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

The community sector high-level forum includes representatives of not only various Departments and statutory agencies but also union representatives. To be fair, the forum is chaired by the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform but it includes the various Departments that have responsibilities towards the community and voluntary sector and not just the valuable organisations that provide CE schemes funded by my Department. All of the Departments recognise the valuable services provided in communities by people on CE schemes. That is why the high-level forum was established.

I am not sure whether Deputy Brady is aware of the history of this case and that the Labour Court made a recommendation. It did not make a ruling. The recommendation has been scoped with input from IGEES on the costs of providing Exchequer support to all involved in the community and voluntary sector. Unlike Deputy Broughan, who is an Opposition Deputy, we do not have the option of pitting one part of the community and voluntary sector against another. If one is going to do something, one must respect equally the contribution made by all those in the community and voluntary sector. That is why this is such a difficult task. If it was easy to fix, it would have been fixed.

We have not looked at individual costs for CE scheme supervisors because one cannot fix the problem without causing an additional problem elsewhere. We have learnt lessons from the past when we tried to fix issues in a piecemeal way by ignoring the outputs from advisory groups.

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