Willie O'Dea (Limerick City, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Out of all the queries, e-mails and personal visits I received on JobPath, I wish to read the Minister an excerpt from one e-mail which comes from someone in the Minister's constituency. I will be careful not to identify the person. The person said they will be 60 in a few weeks' time and they have been in full-time employment from 1976 until 2007 in a very responsible position.

Currently I am enrolled in the Seetec JobPath programme and I am finding the experience humiliating, extremely stressful and demoralising, as I am made to feel inferior and of little worth and even though I am engaging in every procedure that is required I am constantly being made to feel that I am going to be coerced into something, regardless of my experience. I look at the faces of people I meet in their 50s and 60s who have been told they have to learn how to use a computer, that are being intimidated into doing so, and they mirror exactly my feelings of stress and anxiety.

I could go on. The e-mail finishes in saying: "Please keep my identity secret because if Seetec [the contracting company] find out it was me who contacted you, I could not face any further hassle from them."

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