Mr. Joe Saunders:

Certainly. I thank the Chair and the Deputy.

To address the food banks issue, I agree 100%. This should not be something that becomes embedded in our practices as a society. This was a moment-in-time response. I welcome the fact that the Minister of State has set up a working group on this but, as the Deputy rightly identifies, it is an issue to do with the adequacy of income provision. It is at this level that it should be sorted on a long-term basis. From our perspective, the pandemic has shown that this need existed. It predated the pandemic but it came out because suddenly people realised there was an option to access the service in this way. Even in the context of my office, which is a central office that does not necessarily deal with the public, we had huge demands being placed on us and we had to redirect certain of those demands to local areas. The point is well made and I agreed with it. This should not be allowed to be embedded. It is a moment-in-time response which needs to evolve rapidly into a more long-term response.

On the LES issue and the possible dual-strand approach, the job conditions and, of course, the job qualifications which speaks to the quality of the service in the current LES is something that we need to drag everybody up to, not drag down to others. My fear for a dual-stranded process is contagion from the poorer standard to the better standard. It behoves us to respect and protect the employment conditions, but also the service standards, that are currently so positively evaluated by external agencies such as Indecon and ESRI in relation to local employment services.