John Paul Phelan (Fine Gael)

I welcome the Minister of State to this timely discussion about the role and future direction of FÁS. The agency has been in and out of the headlines for a number of months, although it is only in the past couple of weeks that some very disturbing details have emerged about practices at the top management level in FÁS. The Minister addressed some of those issues in his remarks.

The second paragraph of the Minister's speech states that forecasts for both employment and unemployment have been revised downwards. I did not realise that unemployment forecasts had been revised downwards——