Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Sinn Fein)
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34. To ask the Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation if he will provide a list of the disability related action in the Government’s Action Plan for Jobs 2015. [18378/15]

Richard Bruton (Dublin North Central, Fine Gael)
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Action Plan for Jobs (APJ) 2015 was published in January and is the fourth in the multi-annual series. In addition to explicitly setting out measures to be taken by Government over the course of a year to enhance the environment for job retention and creation, it also points to parallel Government strategies which deal with other sectors or policy areas, for example Food Harvest 2020, Harnessing Our Ocean Wealth, and the new Tourism Action Plan.

The Action Plan for Jobs does not repeat all of the constituent actions which make up these other strategies, rather their inclusion signals their importance to the jobs effort, and links their implementation to the Government’s broad approach to employment creation. In this context, disability related action in APJ 2015 is captured in action 128 of this year’s plan. Action 128 in the APJ commits Government to implement the actions agreed under the Comprehensive Employment Strategy for Persons with Disabilities, a strategy which falls under the remit of the Department for Justice and Equality.

The employment strategy is a cross-government approach that brings together actions by different Departments and state agencies in a concerted effort to address the barriers and challenges that impact on employment of people with disabilities. The aim of the strategy is to ensure that more people with disabilities can access work and that services at local level are coordinated and there is joined up access across agency boundaries to deliver more seamless supports to people with disabilities.

Under Action 128 of the APJ, the comprehensive strategy is to be finalised by the end of Q2 and I understand that a revised draft of the Comprehensive Employment Strategy was well received at the April 14th meeting of the National Disability Strategy Implementation Group, the Group responsible for its publication.