Vol. 465 No. 5
29 Mr. B. O'Keeffe asked the Minister for Enterprise and Employment if his attention has been drawn to the concern among arts organisations regarding the new criteria which have been introduced by his Department relative to the FÁS community schemes. [7967/96]
Community Employment (CE) is designed primarily to prevent marginalisation among long-term unemployed people whose principal or only source of income is a social welfare payment. Its objective is to provide such persons with temporary work experience opportunities together with an element of training that would enhance their prospects of mainstream employment.
Under the CE programme, public sector and voluntary organisations are grant-aided by FÁS in respect of sponsoring a CE project and they in turn benefit in a secondary way by being able to carry out worthwhile work which they could not otherwise undertake. Suitable projects would be those that can be shown to respond to a clearly identified community need and which also develop the work skills of participants, thereby enhancing their prospect of mainstream employment.
As such the programme is designed primarily to meet the needs of those who are long-term unemployed and was never meant to provide ongoing core funding for the Arts which may be funded by other Exchequer or private sources.
The changes to CE are being introduced in order to better target the programme at the long-term unemployed so that they may share in the benefits of economic growth along with other sectors of society. You will appreciate that, despite the success of the Government's overall economic and employment startegy in creating jobs, recent statistics indicate that such persons are often bypassed in job selection.
