Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The way it works is that anyone who has a start date for a CE scheme - and if that start date is within four weeks - can take that up ahead of any referral to a job provider such as Turas Nua or Seetec. The Department's policy is one of work and jobs first. We want to get people into regular employment and reserve places on employment programmes like CE and Tús for those who are unable to gain such employment. The initial work we want to do with people in the first year or so, whether it is done through Intreo or Seetec, is to assist them into full-time paid employment. If that is not successful after a year or so, they are then very good candidates for CE schemes, Tús schemes or other programmes. That is very much the policy and I think it makes sense.

Although I have seen many such cases, I do not want to see people who have been on the live register for years only wanting to take part in CE schemes all of a sudden when they are referred to JobPath, although they had an opportunity to do CE schemes years earlier. We cannot have people chopping and changing between different programmes and schemes. Once a person is on one scheme, he or she remains on it until such time as it finishes.

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