My Department's responsibilities under the Operational Programme for Human Resources Development are several fold. It provides the secretariat and chairman for, and is a direct participant on, the monitoring committee which has overall responsibility for managing and implementing the programme. The monitoring committee is a partnership structure between the European Commission and the Irish Administration, comprising representatives of the relevant Commission directorates, Government Departments and their implementing agencies and the social partners. As the national authority for the European Social Fund, it has responsibility for drawing down and disbursing the European Social Fund component of the programme and for acting as secretariat to the monitoring committee in so far as accounting for expenditure and reporting on progress on the implementation of the programme is concerned. It has policy responsibility for the specific components of the programme which are delivered by FÁS in the domain of continuing training and other labour market measures.
Responsibility for ensuring that measures under the programme are implemented in an equitable manner rests in the first instance with implementing agencies and their boards where relevant, for example, FÁS and the NRB, over-seen from policy perspective by their parent Departments — the Departments of Enterprise and Employment and Health in the foregoing instances — or by Departments where they are the direct implementing agencies, for example, the Departments of Education and Justice. The monitoring committee also provides overarching supervision of the implementation of the programme.
