Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I welcome Deputy Ó Snodaigh's support for JobsPlus as well as Deputy O'Dea's support for JobBridge. With these schemes we are following Lord Keynes' advice that, at a time of depression and recession, the critical thing is to get more money circulating in the economy, and one of the best ways of doing that is to get as many of our people as possible back to work.

Deputy Ó Snodaigh knows as well as I do the number of people who used to be up at 6 a.m. on a lovely day like today, out working on construction sites and finishing only when the light went down. In the period after the Anglo Irish Bank bailout and the bank guarantee, this country lost 250,000 jobs. We fell off a cliff as regards employment. Quite a number of those people are still out of employment because they were in construction. They need to transfer, so this is an opportunity for them.

One of my concerns is that when an employer looks at somebody's CV, if the person has been out of work for one, two or three years, the employer will wonder about the gap. We try to fill that gap through education, training, community employment, job placement and JobBridge. As service under any of those schemes is included in the calculation of one or two years out of employment, employers will be getting people who will potentially have a lot of experience in different areas.

We will monitor the scheme by having employers apply online. Obviously, if an employer has just had redundancies and reductions in its labour force, this is the kind of development that would perhaps indicate an attempt at displacement, and we would seek to exclude such employers.

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