Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour)

I thank the Minister of State for his reply but remind him that since the last general election, 200,000 extra people have gone on the live register, some for the first time. What he describes is business as usual when we, effectively, had full employment. If FÁS has the capacity for an extra 51,000, then there is something seriously wrong with the organisation. We know from the quality of some of the back to work courses it offered in the past that they are substandard to meet the needs of the type of people who have been high flyers with SR Technics or elsewhere and who want to go to an institute of technology to get computer skills or otherwise.

The 51,000 places will, I estimate, cost of the order of an extra €70 million. If the figure is of that magnitude, will the Minister of State make a clear commitment to this House that he will not assign it to FÁS to subcontract out to somebody else, including many private contractors whose quality is dubious, but to the institutes of technology and other bodies under his remit in education to provide new types of courses for recently unemployed people who do not want to do the traditional back to work courses which will not meet their needs?

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