Dara Calleary (Mayo, Fianna Fail)
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232. To ask the Minister for Employment Affairs and Social Protection the number of eligible persons in each county referred to community employment schemes and to a JobPath company, respectively in each of the years 2017 to 2020, in tabular form. [3398/21]

Joe O'Brien (Dublin Fingal, Green Party)
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My Department provides a range of activation supports for long-term unemployed jobseekers and those most distant from the labour market to secure and sustain full-time paid employment. These supports include Community Employment (CE) and JobPath.

CE is an active labour market programme designed to enhance the employability of disadvantaged and unemployed people by providing work experience and training opportunities for them within their communities. The programme helps break the cycle of unemployment and improve a person’s chances of returning to the labour market.

JobPath is an employment activation service that supports people who are long-term unemployed and those most at risk of becoming long-term unemployed to secure and sustain paid employment. The service is delivered by two companies, Seetec and Turas Nua.

From the 1st June 2018, persons availing of the JobPath service have also been able to participle on CE. This enables long-term jobseekers to benefit from the strengths of both programmes, the job-seeking support of a JobPath personal advisor and quality training and development opportunities provided by the CE scheme.

The Department's activation teams contacts long-term jobseekers to seek expressions of interest in participation on the CE programme. The following table provides a breakdown of the number of those recorded contacts made with potential CE candidates by Department Case Officers and Local Employment Services from the end of November, 2017 until the end of December 2020. New ICT systems were introduced in Q4 2017 which enabled this information to be programmatically recorded. The related county data is not available at present.

The following table provides a breakdown by county of those jobseekers referred to and engaged with Job Path for the years 2017 to 2020.