Regina Doherty (Meath East, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The purpose of this lower payment is to encourage younger people to provide themselves with opportunities such as back to education, to provide community employment schemes or any of the activation measures that are available to support, assist and help younger people into employment and into the workforce. Let me point out something to the Deputy. It is working. One of the largest drops in unemployment has been in our younger people, and particularly in our younger graduates over the last number of years. The Deputy's ambition for younger people might be entirely different to mine, but my ambition for younger people who still remain on the live register is to help to work hard and to do everything that we can to support them into full-time, meaningful, well-paid employment. That is what we are going to focus on.

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