Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail)

I cannot agree with the Senator who obviously has not read the whole Bill. Commencement orders are involved. One primary purpose of the Bill is to provide for activation. However, it is a question of considering which comes first: the hen or the egg. As far as we are concerned, it is interlocking. As the Senator is aware, the putting in place of the rural social scheme transformed the lives of many farmers who came to me from throughout the country to inform me of the benefits in getting work which suited them in their communities. This worked because the schemes were well organised by the communities and were a transforming feature in the lives of the people concerned. They were not unemployed because they had farms. Let us consider someone who is totally unemployed. The rule for getting an unemployment payment is that a person is not in full-time education or in work. There is the problem of not having anything to do because that is the condition on which the payment is given. My proposal is that people are given something useful to do. I come from a strong community background and I believe communities should have a great deal of involvement in resolving their own problems. I have not seen communities in all my years creating jobs in both the commercial and voluntary sectors forcing people on to unsuitable schemes. They matched people to jobs they were good at because that generated the greatest return for the community.

I have a clear plan, even if the Senator does not know about it, whereby communities are motivated to create jobs through schemes and they are allowed to decide their priorities, whether it is environmental work, training children in music, sport and so on or after school care. Much work needs to be done in our society. If we do this through the community structures under FÁS, the rural social scheme, the community services programme and so on, we need not worry too much about the communities matching the skills of their people to their requirements. I have too much respect for communities to think they will not do that.

With regard to more formal courses, there are plenty of protections in the law regarding unreasonable questions being asked and reducing the payment because the training was not warranted on the basis of existing qualifications and experience and so on. Plenty of protections are in place and I do not believe what I propose will get anyone except the people we should get and if Senators want to dodge around that because of so-called concerns, they are not in tune with what people are saying on the ground, which is that the genuinely unemployed should be helped in every way and they are crying out for opportunities to serve their communities and those who are not genuinely unemployed should have their payments stopped.

We will continue to disagree on this. I come from a community background where I was a Gaeltacht co-operative manager for many years working with other co-operative managers to transform some of the most isolated, rural communities in the country. We know what we did for our own people in bringing them from idle communities to working communities and the social benefit we generated. The disciplines we imposed reduced the incidence of social problems such as alcoholism, marriage breakdown and so on because we created jobs and a work ethic. Other areas had "poverty programmes" and they are worse off in the context of social problems now than they were 30 years ago whereas we transformed the social reality of people's lives in our communities while starting out at the same time.

In this case, we are acting in the best interests of our citizens and when we go to the electorate in two years, a large number of people will say the Government and I were right, we did what was in the interests of society and we had the courage to do it and all the sceptics who said we would not create jobs and training places were wrong because we had a plan that clearly worked.