Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

The youth guarantee will be run on a national basis.

While it is unlikely that the Department will operate a specific scheme for each of the more than 60 local offices, as well as sub-offices run by contractors to the Department, there will be flexibility to tailor the implementation to local conditions with regard to the cohorts or groups of young people to be selected for engagement in the first instance. Therefore, the specific approach to be followed in County Meath, for example, will be a matter for the local departmental management in consultation with relevant stakeholders. I include public representatives in the area as being among those relevant stakeholders and, most importantly, employers. What I am seeking to achieve is a cultural change and to ask employers to include young people.

Later in the year and specifically in the forthcoming legislation we will widen the scope of a number of existing schemes that the Department operates to open them to people under 25 years of age. That might mean community employment, CE, schemes. There are people aged 24 years who might never have worked and the route to a job for them could be to go back into education or to continue the education they did not finish or it could be to participate in a local community employment scheme. I have visited Cork and saw a number of CE schemes which specifically involve young people in activities relating to local leisure centres, sporting activities and so forth, in which there is a great interest.

It is a very wide canvas but the critical issue is to bring in employers in the locality, both to tell young people about the types of jobs that exist and to include them when considering the people they are hiring.

See this speech in context