Ms Susanne Rogers:

The Deputy referred to the assistance that is given when people have tried and not found work. I remember my own experience of having to go back to what I will colloquially call the dole office after six months to prove that I had been looking for work. I was raging. I went in with this folder of applications that I was not getting any replies to.

I thought I was going to have a fight with the person in the dole office and then, when she realised I was looking for work and was not successful, she asked what the office needed to do to help me. That utterly transformed how I thought she was doing her job as well. It was looking at CV creation, the ECDL and other things. That is a massive part of it but local is everything. When we look at unemployment blackspots, local is the key. As the Deputy said, it is about targeting specific areas. It is a person thing and it is a place thing. We know who the people are and where the places are. It will be about education, childcare and transport. I know myself from periods of unemployment that those were the issues. My skill set, my education attainment levels, my caring duties and where the jobs were versus where I was were the barriers to going back to employment.

When we talk about things like intergenerational transmission of disadvantage, however, I am also conscious of the transmission of occupational advantage. This is a term I came across recently. It is learning how to work and how to labour. It is all of those things such as the transmission, the social networks and how to be in work. As the Deputy said, you watch other people in your community engage in the process. I was struck by that because we would write a lot about the first one but not about the advantage part of it. It is about the local and going back to the SDGs. SDG 8 and all of the SDGs need to be embedded in people's locality. National is fine but we can see from the data that the greater Dublin area is where the jobs are. That is where the high-paying jobs are. As you go further out and further west and north, we need to ask why those opportunity are not there. That is a long rambling answer but-----