Vol. 494 No. 3
133 Mr. Haughey asked the Tánaiste and Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment her views in relation to the position of many women who have worked in the home and therefore do not have credits, paid contributions or a social welfare payment of any kind, thus ensuring that they are not eligible for FÁS courses or community employment schemes; her plans, if any, to rectify this situation; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [17582/98]
The Government in An Action Programme for the Millennium is committed to ensuring that opportunities will be made available to women in the home to undertake training in order to return to work. In this regard all mainstream/specific skills training courses run by FÁS are open to every person who is unemployed and seeking employment regardless of gender, though preference is given to people on the live register.
The Community Employment — CE programme, however, is designed to specifically target a particular severely disadvantaged group of unemployed people, i.e., those registered long-term unemployed whose principal or only source of income is an unemployment compensation payment or certain other social welfare means tested payments. This targeting maximises the availability of places by part financing the programme for savings in social welfare payments.
FÁS has been endeavouring through its Action Programme for Women to increase the level of female participation on all FÁS programmes. The focus of the agency's strategy has been to promote womens participation in the full range of specific skills training courses, the largest programme run by FÁS, by targeting places in non-traditional and new technology courses in which there has been little or no previous representation by women.
A number of innovative and flexible approaches to training have been undertaken, including flexibility of hours of attendance and multi-media delivery of training. Both the latter innovations are particularly suitable to the training needs of women in the home. In 1997, 5,171 women completed Specific Skills training courses with FÁS. This represented 44 per cent of the total number of people completing such training.
FÁS also provides courses such as return to work and enterprise training which has a high proportion of women participants particularly home-makers. In addition to the standard return to work course, FÁS has developed and implemented a pilot project which delivers return to work training and guidance services in a more flexible manner. In 1997, 536 women of the 1,694 who participated in the return to work programme participated in this pilot project.
FÁS is also very conscious of the need for child care facilities for women who return to work, and contributes over £5 million per annum to community-based childcare provision by way of support for CE projects. Approximately 130 CE projects have such a childcare dimension. Many of these facilities provide community-based childcare for women undertaking training or education.
