Eamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire, Labour)

The Government's approach to people who are out of work is to assist them with training and education. We help them to find job experience and internships, where appropriate. That will enable them to work themselves back into employment as jobs become available. The Government has no intention of allowing people to languish on unemployment payments without taking active measures to help them to return into employment and improve their skills. In fact, the OECD has criticised the performance of previous Governments in this respect. Deputy Higgins seems to have an absolute fascination with the Minister, Deputy Burton. I presume it is because he shares a constituency with her. The approach being led by the Minister is about reforming our social welfare system so that rather than being left in long-term unemployment, people are enabled to get back into employment as quickly as possible. Her proposals and reforms will be set out in a strategy document, Pathways to Work, which is to be published shortly. A range of activation measures will help people to re-equip themselves for the workforce and get retraining, where appropriate. The interviews mentioned by Deputy Higgins are necessary because people have individual needs. Unemployed people are not statistics.

We are not talking about percentages - we are talking about people. Individual people have different needs, depending on where they previously worked and their levels of education and experience. The Minister, Deputy Burton, is putting in place a new regime whereby individual people who are out of work will be talked with individually. Their needs, requirements and wishes will be established. Our State training, education and labour activation systems will be used to help them to improve themselves while they are out of work. That strategy will be implemented in conjunction with the strategy the Government is pursuing to attract investment to this country, create jobs and reduce the number of people who are on the live register. I assure Deputy Higgins that we want to get them back into gainful employment as quickly as possible

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