Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour)

I thank Deputy Browne, the new chairperson of the Fianna Fáil Parliamentary Party, for mentioning me during his contribution. I recall the occasion to which he referred.

It is important that the House should remember the history of FÁS and understand how we reached this point. A great deal of ill-informed comment has been made about the cosy cartel, a matter to which my constituency colleague, Deputy Creighton, also referred. FÁS succeeded AnCO, which was established in 1967 and which was a training organisation with responsibility for formulating apprenticeships. It was logical and essential that employers and the trade unions should be represented on the board of AnCO. It would, after all, be their representatives who would ensure that properly qualified apprentices would emerge into the workforce and lift its skills base. That is exactly what happened.

When I served as Minister for Labour in the early 1980s, a proposal came forward that three organisations, namely, the placement service of the Department of Labour, AnCO and the Youth Employment Agency - at one point a fourth agency, CERT, was included - should be merged. Legislation relating to the establishment of a national employment training agency was introduced at that time but it did not progress beyond Second Stage because, in the dying days of that Dáil, CERT mounted a wonderful rear-guard action and torpedoed it. My successor, Deputy Bertie Ahern, introduced the legislation that brought about the establishment of FÁS.

A famous American academic who spent a sabbatical here and who examined the work of FÁS and the way its community employment programmes - to which Deputy Browne referred and which, prior to the establishment of FÁS, were directly administered by the then Department of Labour - famously referred to the organisation's flexibility and the fleet-footed way in which it operated. He also referred to it as the Government's Swiss army knife - a tool that could be applied to any kind of task without the need for endless negotiations on devolution, consultation, displacement, replacement, etc. There is a grave danger that we might throw the baby out with the bathwater in this regard. I could say much more about that matter but I will not do so.

There has been a great deal of media comment regarding the social partners who are members of the board of FÁS and their apparent failure to take the necessary action following the revelations that emerged. It was the board, in its entirety, which established the internal audit that revealed all of the unacceptable practices that were prevalent in FÁS. In addition, the board made it known that it was not informed about certain matters by members of the senior management of the organisation. If one is not informed of something and one has no reason to believe one is being excluded from a particular process, then one is surely entitled to be treated with a certain degree of understanding.

The one group of directors who have not been referred to - with the exception of a previous intervention I made in respect of them in the House - were the four senior civil servants who were appointed to the board by the Departments of Finance, Enterprise, Trade and Employment, Social and Family Affairs and Education and Science, respectively. These individuals are full-time public servants, not part-time board members. When they leave board meetings, they are obliged to return to their duties in their respective Departments. What were they doing in respect of the unacceptable practices that emerged? Did they have any suspicions with regard to such practices? Did they meet and consult each other on this matter? Did they bring to the attention of, for example, the excessive amounts of money that appeared to be available to FÁS at a time when an endless number of other priorities required attention? Were proper reporting mechanisms in place in order to allow these civil servants to report to their Ministers?

I do not know when the Second Stage debate on this legislation will be completed. In any event, the matters to which I refer should be dealt with on Committee Stage. Unless there is a proper mechanism in place to allow a civil servant to report to his or her parent Department or the Department of Finance, we will not improve the operational capacity of FÁS. My party will be tabling amendments in respect of this matter on Committee Stage.

One specific issue I wish to raise is the traditional turf warfare that has gone on for decades between what are now called the Departments of Education and Science and Enterprise, Trade and Employment. Formerly it was a war between the old Departments of Education and Labour. The basic point was that the Department of Education and Science is responsible for producing young adults who can read and write and that it is not the responsibility of a training agency to engage in picking up the failures of the education system by running literacy programmes in parallel with programmes in carpentry, electricity or child care.

I am pleased the Minister of State, Deputy Haughey, is present in the Chamber because he has responsibility for the area of literacy to which I refer. His cross-appointment in the two Departments is welcome. Nevertheless, I have it on direct account from people in the literacy field that the turf war continues and Members will be discussing amendments on this issue in my name and others when the Bill reaches Committee Stage. While I am conscious of time constraints, out of courtesy I wish to give notice to the Department and the Minister of State, Deputy Haughey, that they will be asked to examine the existing legislation from 1987 and 1999. They will be asked to consider the possibility of granting additional powers to the Minister of State or Minister to give policy directions to both the board and senior management of FÁS and to its local operations, which is where the problem exists vis-À-vis the issue of illiteracy.

If one is unable to read in this economy, one is unable to get a job. I refer to functional illiteracy. While I acknowledge there is a dispute about the figures, which hopefully have improved subsequently, the Minister of State reluctantly revealed to me on foot of a number of supplementary questions that the last time it was surveyed, it was of the order of half a million people. I repeat that the figure is half a million people out of a workforce of 2.2 million people. Moreover, even when virtually full employment obtained, the Governor of Mountjoy Prison, John Lonergan, the Irish National Organisation of the Unemployed and many others noted that the basic reason many people were not getting jobs or would not go for job interviews was that they lacked sufficient confidence in themselves to be able to read the instructions that came with the job specifications. This is the reason many people did not apply for jobs. While they were happy to work in the kind of social and community employment programmes to which Deputy Browne has referred and their work is a valid contribution to the stock of wealth within our community, these jobs were not self-sustaining. The social and community employment programmes that I had the honour of introducing were not designed as a permanent bed. They were intended as a spring from which many people could bounce back up into the sustainable labour market. The third sector was intended as a place to provide an outlet for the energies and creativity of those who did not wish to be at home. No matter what was the rate of unemployment payment, such people would prefer to be out working.

If, on examining the amendments to be tabled by the Labour Party, the Minister of State is dissatisfied with their formulation, he should table better ones himself if he so wishes as I believe we share a similar objective. At present, our education system fails young people coming through the system for a variety of reasons. Members are familiar with both the drop-out rate and the profile of those who drop out. Manifestly and overwhelmingly, they are 15 year old and 16 year old working class male children. These are the individuals who at best drift into long-term unemployment or at worst, straight into Mountjoy Prison via the drugs trail, criminality and so on. It is much cheaper, more effective and more enabling for all concerned to use sections of the training programme of FÁS to pick up where the Department of Education and Science, an overcrowded classroom or an under-motivated family have left off. I consider families to have the primary responsibility to instil an understanding of reading in a child. A child who does not have a story read to him or her going to bed at the age of two or three is put at a disadvantage relative to those children who are lucky enough to have parents who will read. However, there are houses in my constituency that have half a dozen televisions, radios and DVD players but not a single book. No school can counteract this.

I welcome this new legislation. While there is much to be said in this regard, some of it already has been said. FÁS and AnCO have a glorious past and a very good record. In respect of what has happened recently, there will be another day and another place to deal with that issue and it should be dealt with justly. However, Members must ensure that the new FÁS under new direction has the capability to pick up, as a second chance, those young people our education system has failed.

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