Gerald Nash (Louth, Labour)

As a director of several sponsor companies and an active proponent of the community employment system, I join colleagues in welcoming the opportunity to debate the Minister's review into the operation and efficacy of the schemes. In doing so, we must be honest with ourselves, as the Minister urged. We also must be honest with the communities we represent and the schemes which depend on the community employment framework. Communities need community employment and community employment-type supports to enable them to function properly. In any debate about these schemes, we must be straight with those whose future prospects and life chances depend on robust and relevant labour market activation measures.

The first question we must ask ourselves is whether the community employment system has the full capacity to set the jobless free from the clutches of social welfare. That is arguable. Is it fit for purpose as a passport to a new job? Are the training and education opportunities and the way in which money is spent appropriate to the needs of those who must be equipped to do themselves justice in a very competitive labour market? We would all acknowledge that these schemes have played an important role as a community intervention. They have built capacity in our communities and occupy a vital space from which the State generally removed itself decades ago.

Whether one agrees with the findings of the ESRI report to which the Minister referred, we must take seriously the institute's position, as well as that expressed recently by the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform, and give them the credence they deserve. If the community employment framework is not the route to a job, as many reports have contended, and if we can spend the money in a way that better delivers real opportunities in sustainable sectors of the economy and in our communities, then we must give consideration to changing our approach to some degree.

However, a straight accounting exercise on the value of community employment schemes would miss the point entirely. Instead, we must measure the social value of community employment, in so far as that is ever entirely possible, and look at it from the perspective of what our communities would look like if these schemes were removed from the landscape. We should move towards a situation where there is acknowledgment of the intrinsic social value of community employment schemes and a commitment to resource a community employment-type model of service provision for the communities that need it most, while at the same time devising a new, responsive system which properly caters for the needs of the labour market gaps that exist today and the economic opportunities that will arise in the future.

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