Joe Flaherty (Longford-Westmeath, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State. I welcome the official response but he really cut to the chase in his closing comments. I have no issue with the welfare partners portal. Indeed, community employment scheme supervisors recognise it as a top-class piece of kit. The reality, however, is that a serious situation is evolving. There is an eminently sensible situation to the problem, which is that we should not fix what is not broken. The welfare partners portal has worked very well. It does exactly what it says on the tin and exactly what it is intended to do. It allowed the safe and secure sharing of sensitive information under the control of community employment supervisors, so long as supervisors merely had to log on and review the data before making a submission. It worked perfectly well. There is no need to fix what is not broken.

As I said, the Carrickedmond and Legan scheme in County Longford is a very good one. It has 15 participants in a disparate region across south Longford. It engages with nine community groups and covers Legan, Abbeyshrule, Carrickedmond, Barry, Colehill, Carrickboy, Taghshinny and Ballycloghan. I feel like Deputies Danny and Michael Healy-Rae as I am naming all these areas. They are important principalities in their own right across south Longford. The reality is that the life expectancy of this scheme is now threatened, with the funding suspended because the scheme sponsors are not able to engage with the new guidelines. They are simply unworkable. The scheme is going to run out of money in the coming weeks. This is a scheme that helped Abbeyshrule village to become a Tidy Towns national winner a number of years ago. Now the scheme is facing closure. That eventuality can be averted simply by doing exactly what the scheme advises and suggests should be done. What is needed is to continue to do what we did previously, which is allowing the scheme supervisors to manage and administer the welfare partners portal and requiring the scheme sponsors only to log in and approve the documents. That was what was done and what worked successfully for a number of years.

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