Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

With regard to the final point on training, when the scheme was transferred to the Department the allocation for training from the national training fund was €4.2 million, which was approximately €190 per participant per scheme, and this funding is included in the budget allocation I mentioned earlier. To be clear, the terms of the review were to examine the income and funding of sponsoring organisations in terms of their ability to continue the programme with reduced funding from the Department of Social Protection. Community and voluntary sponsoring organisations receive funding from a multiplicity of State agencies. Deputies familiar with community employment schemes will know that in some cases, perhaps in the case of the scheme in Offaly which assists people with a disability, they may also be in receipt of other funding, for instance from the HSE, the Department of Education and Skills or educational bodies. This is part of the reason that collecting this enormous body of data on community employment has been so difficult and so demanding. I thank all of the community employment schemes which, for the most part, have been extremely co-operative and helpful in providing data. It came from a slow start, to be honest, which is one of the reasons it has been difficult to get a full picture.

I am very conscious of what happened previously, which was that many of the reports published on community employment were not flattering to it but they did not tend to address the issue of services provided. I was anxious that when community employment came under the remit of the Department of Social Protection the issue of the delivery of service and its importance and significance to local communities throughout the country would be taken into account.

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