Seán Fleming (Laois-Offaly, Fianna Fail)

Fianna Fáil proposes that FÁS staff must be sent to the Department of Social Protection. FÁS should be closed down at the beginning of next year and its staff should be merged into the Department of Social Protection. This would enable people to go into a benefits and jobs office. In this scenario, the first thing someone who loses his or her job will do is to go to the jobs office to see if a job or training scheme is available. When people have done that, they can then register for jobseeker's allowance, rather than the other way around, whereby people register for jobseeker's allowance but no mechanism is in place.

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