Dara Calleary (Mayo, Fianna Fail)

Tuigim cé chomh tábhachtach atá na scéimeanna seo. Tá siad ag déanamh an-jab i ngach cuid den tír. Tosóimid le CE agus beimid in ann RSS agus Tús a phlé ar ball. Community employment schemes make an extraordinary contribution right around the country. I have engaged with many of the schemes over recent months since my appointment as Minister. There are currently 19,693 participants and 1,223 supervisors on 810 CE schemes across the country. Government investment in CE will amount to some €370 million in 2025. This is an investment in communities and in people right across our island.

The objective of CE is to enhance the employability of disadvantaged and long-term unemployed people by providing valuable work experience and training opportunities within their local communities as a stepping stone to employment in the open labour market. CE also supports important and essential local community services.

A number of changes have been made to support CE sponsors in the recruitment of participants. Provision has been made to allow participants who reach 60 years of age to remain on a CE scheme until they reach the State pension age. Flexibility has been granted to sponsors to retain existing participants for extended periods in cases where a replacement cannot be recruited immediately. There have been changes to the eligibility criteria to extend eligibility to the adult dependants of those in receipt of jobseeker's allowance and there has been a pilot scheme to extend eligibility to over-50s who are in receipt of credits or a combination of credits and jobseeker's benefit. These changes have resulted in an increase of approximately 500 in the number of participants in CE in the past 12 months.

I assure Deputies McGuinness and Ó Snodaigh that I am keeping the eligibility criteria, durations and referral process under active review. Personally, I no longer see CE as a labour market intervention. It is much broader and wider than that and has a much bigger impact. I am asking my Department to look at it in a much broader context than the labour market perspective that has traditionally been taken.

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