Joe O'Brien (Dublin Fingal, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I will take Deputy Calleary’s point first. He may have missed my opening statement. When I talk about CE, I always talk about two halves, the activation side and the service side. I clearly stated that this morning as well. I always acknowledge it.

There have been challenges in CE prior to Covid-19 about referral rates. There were issues prior to my time, because of the low unemployment rate or the high employment rate. That did impact referrals to CE. I am not pretending that there were not issues prior to that. That is to be acknowledged. My figure for vacancies at the moment is 1,938. That is about 9% of places vacant. I do accept that there will be some projects that are down on the 60% level of vacancies. We have 79 community development officers, CDOs, around the country who should be and are engaging with their local sponsors about targeted actions to fill those projects that are under more pressure than average.

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