Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

Okay; we will call it very modest. In fairness, the Minister, Deputy Noonan, was very frank in his acknowledgment at the committee that several of the initiatives he has brought forward are experiments which may or may not work. That is an honest approach. Given the scale of the crisis we face, we have no choice but to thrash out different ideas and schemes and give them our best shot. It is in this spirit that I put it to the Minister of State that what he just said does not stack up. I cannot envisage a scenario in which somebody would give up a job in order to avail of this scheme. It is simply not plausible.

The issue is one of deciding to whom this modest scheme should be available. Just as it is wrong in the case of other schemes administered by the Department of Social Protection, including the back-to-education allowance, it is wrong in this instance to stipulate that applicants must be unemployed for 12 months before they can avail of it. That does not make sense. I cannot count the number of times people have come into my clinic lamenting this bizarre requirement and saying how much they want to get back to work. The last thing they want is to slide into a situation in which unemployment becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and they become depressed and less motivated to return to work. When people lose their job, their first instinct is to get back into the workforce immediately. I agree with the Minister of State in so far as he is arguing that this scheme should be aligned with other social protection measures, but my argument is that the latter must also be changed. We should not have a time lag for eligibility of 12 months in any instance. Instead, we must try to get people back to work as soon as possible.

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