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

Community employment, CE, is the largest employment programme administered by my Department.  It was initially established in 1994 to enhance the employability of unemployed persons by providing work experience and training opportunities for them within their communities close to their homes.  Its objective was, and remains, to help long-term unemployed people to re-enter the active workforce. It was always intended and it has been the practice that the numbers of people on community employment or similar schemes, such as Tús and the rural social scheme, RSS, at any point in time would reflect the number of long-term unemployed people on the live register. It is because of this that the governing rules were established, arein situ and still established today.

Thankfully, the number of people on the long-term live register has fallen very significantly in recent years from more than 200,000 people a short five years ago to about 76,000 people today.  Given the reduction in the live register, we have to recognise that there are challenges in ensuring that we can refer sufficient numbers of people with appropriate skills to resource all of the existing the schemes at the level the schemes require.

I refute what Deputy O'Dea has said. I am not changing the focus with regard to the interdepartmental group I have established. I am trying to acknowledge the reality of the current system and the fact that one set of governing rules does not actually fit the reality of what our community employment schemes do today. I am fully committed, have always been and will always be to the future of our community employment schemes. They make an enormous and valuable contribution to our communities. I want to see them sustained, which is not the current position given the difficulties of the accessibility and the rules required of people to either apply for CE or to stay on CE. Thankfully, the Government agreed to my establishing the interdepartmental group to explore the most appropriate organisational arrangements with regard to all our schemes. The primary focus is on social inclusion, or sheltered employment, and the delivery of the services they provide for all of our towns and villages.

The first meeting of the interdepartmental group was held last week and it is expected that the group will have set of recommendations for me to bring to bring to Cabinet by end of the second quarter.

In his parliamentary question, Deputy O'Dea specifically asked about the claim by CE supervisors-----

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