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

We have gone from a situation in Ireland where, only five or six years ago, we were in the middle of an economic and unemployment crisis. Some 15% of people were unemployed and people were being forced to emigrate again. We have net migration now, with more Irish citizens coming home than are leaving, and unemployment at approximately 5%. We will soon reach full employment, the point at which there is a job in Ireland for everyone who genuinely wants one. We are almost there. That is enormous progress in only a few years.

That did not happen by accident. A remarkable thing about Ireland's economic recovery is that we had jobs growth and a fall in unemployment almost from the start of the recovery. Most countries would see the economy recover first with jobs coming later and unemployment falling thereafter. That happened because a decision was taken by the last Government, of which I was a member, with Fine Gael and the Labour Party, to adopt an activist approach to getting people back to work. That is why the Intreo model was set up and why JobPath was contracted by my constituency colleague, Deputy Burton. That is why we continue to support the local employment schemes.

Some people will just find a job on their own but others need help, support, encouragement and training. That is done through different mechanisms. Intreo is the in-house service provided by the excellent staff of the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection around the country. JobPath is outsourced because the Department did not have the capacity at the time of mass unemployment to do all the work. There are also the local employment schemes around the country. These mechanisms have been successful. The JobPath model is a payment by results model. Companies get a registration fee but beyond that they are only paid if the person they are working with enters gainful employment and stays in it for more than three months.

There is a contract. Terminating any contract with any company involves significant costs and penalties for the taxpayer. We are certainly not going to cancel any such contracts. We are entering a different phase in our economy where we are heading towards full employment so obviously services such as JobPath may not be needed in the future but that is an assessment that the Minister, Deputy Regina Doherty, will have to make. In future, the focus will be less on people who are unemployed because unemployment is down so far, and more on activating and encouraging into the labour market people who are not on jobseeker's benefit or jobseeker's allowance.

I encourage anyone who has a complaint to make that complaint to the provider and if he or she is not satisfied with the response, he or she can complain to the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection, which will investigate it. When one looks at the tens or hundreds of thousands of people who have been involved in the various programmes that the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection runs, the percentage of complaints is reassuringly low.

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