Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

It was a very substantial piece of work because, as the Deputy knows, the FÁS employment officers and responsibility for the community employment, CE, schemes transferred to my Department on 1 January. The review was a major undertaking and I received the report in recent weeks. I do not have the exact date, which I can get for the Deputy, but it was towards the end of June. As soon as I received it we contacted those involved with the schemes. However, I was very impressed by the level of contact between the social protection officials, who are now managing CE, and the schemes. I had the opportunity, which I greatly valued, to visit and meet a number of sponsors of schemes and those involved. As there are almost 1,000 schemes, obviously I could not visit them all, but I visited very many of them and had very detailed discussions about how people envisage the schemes being used for the improvement and enhancement of their communities as well as providing quality experience to the participants.

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