Ivana Bacik (Independent)

I commend the Minister for Social Protection on her excellent performance last night on "The Frontline". It was a really superb debate about job activation. There was a very good exchange among all the panellists and I thought that many of the issues dealing with the change of culture in the Department of Social Protection and the implementation of job activation measures were going to be discussed. I thought the discussion was really strong. Anybody watching it would have come away with a much better idea of the enormous change that is being brought about from the old passive system of social welfare, as the Minister described it, to a much more active system where community welfare officers would engage one-to-one with people who are on the live register and seeking to find ways off it through training, upskilling and employment.

The Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation will be in the House next week to debate the jobs plan, and I know that others asked last week for the Minister for Social Protection to come in at some stage to debate the pathways programme. It would be very useful for us to have debates in this House on both the jobs plan and on the job activation measures in the Department of Social Protection.

I welcome the publication of the whistleblowers Bill today. It was promised in the programme for Government and is a long overdue piece of political reform. The Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform has been strongly proactive on this issue, given his own experience in the past in seeking to ensure that inquiries were held into matters of public interest. We should be very grateful to two people who have taken great personal risks in whistleblowing on financial irregularities, and I think it is very important that we now put in place statutory protections for people who blow the whistle in future.