Alice-Mary Higgins (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am very grateful to Senator Burke and thank the Minister of State for joining us. I will be brief. There are three issues I wish to highlight and I would really appreciate the thoughts of the Minister of State and I would love to engage further with him on them.

There are many tens of thousands of qualified adults in Ireland, predominantly women, who do not feature on the live register or in unemployment figures, although they are underemployed. In many cases, they are in jobless households. Will the Minister of State address how he plans to encourage and provide voluntary access to back-to-education, training or job supports and activation schemes to these qualified adults? In many cases these people are not just distant from the jobs market but, having little rights in it, have become distant from the social protection system too. I urge the Minister of State to work closely with his counterpart in the Department of Social Protection to address the question of how we recognise, for example, care credits and ensure that the many tens of thousands of women who fall out of the system maintain their access to job, training and employment opportunities.

Care should be a quality area of employment. It is potentially one of the largest and highest density employment areas with a high ratio of staff. It should be an area of quality employment but, unfortunately, it is not. The sector needs to be developed and deepened. It is unfortunate that many child care workers and early years education workers employed by the State will now enter a period of three months of unemployment as the early childhood care and education, ECCE, schemes end because they are still nine-month schemes. In terms of sustainability, surely this should be a year-round area and an area with a strong progressing path.

The low pay-----