Dara Murphy (Cork North Central, Fine Gael)
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Question 154: To ask the Minister for Education and Skills the person that determines qualifications for the EU's European Globalisation Fund for retraining workers (details supplied); and if he will make a statement on the matter. [12239/12]

Ciarán Cannon (Galway East, Fine Gael)
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On 9 June 2010, the Department submitted an application for co-funded assistance from the European Globalisation Adjustment Fund (EGF) in respect of 9,089 former workers made redundant in the construction NACE 41, 43 and 71 sub-sectors during the nine-month EGF reference period between 1 July 2009 and 31 March 2010. Applications for EGF co-financed assistance are made in support of specified redundant workers. Under the rules pertaining to sectoral applications, only identified workers made redundant during a specified nine-month reference period may be included in the application for EGF support.

In accordance with Article 5(1) of EGF Regulation (EC) No 1927/2006, a maximum period of 10 weeks applies from the end of the EGF reference period in which an EGF application must be submitted. For the three Irish construction sub-sectors, the stipulated reference period ended on 31 March 2010 and the 10-week application period ended on 9 June 2010. Redundant workers for inclusion in the EGF application submitted for all three construction sub-sectors were identified based on the most recent recorded date of registration for a statutory redundancy payment as at 28 April 2010 and, as appropriate for those redundant apprentices included in the NACE 41 and 43 sub-sectors, based on data from the apprenticeship database held by FÁS.

Statutory redundancy payment data on which the cohort of eligible redundant workers was based, was received from the Redundancy Payments Division of the then Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment on 28 April 2010. Other requirements relating to the specification of employers and NACE 2 codings, and which involved liaison by the Department with external bodies holding data, also needed to be verified prior to the submission of the application.

The EGF application was submitted on 9 June 2010 and was made on the basis of particular information at a given point in time. The point in time chosen yielded very substantial levels of redundancies, was based on the best current data available and allowed sufficient time to submit the application within the mandatory deadline. It should be noted that it is not the enterprise making the workers redundant but the individual workers who have been identified as having been made redundant, which is the key element in terms of eligibility. Moreover, the statutory redundancy payments system, on which the EGF application was significantly based, does not automatically follow up each of the 3,349 enterprises encompassed by the application on a rolling basis seeking updated details of all workers who may have been let go at different times. Thus, the relevant information from this source was the best available to my Department when compiling the EGF application.

As such, some 37 former employees of the enterprise named were identified as having been made redundant during the reference period as at 28 April 2010. No persons were informed of EGF eligibility until after the EU budgetary authority approval of the Irish application and its subsequent disaggregation across the three construction sub-sectors on 16 November 2011.