Community Employment Schemes Dail Éireann — 2023-07-06 ============================================================ Seán Sherlock (LAB), Cork East I take the Minister of State's point and I am not trying to apply a broad stroke to this but I think it would be acknowledged that there is a category of workers where the ability to transition to enhancing their digital skills, for instance, would be limited. That is a fact of life. That is a non-judgmental statement I am making. There are unfilled places in community employment schemes. There are people who carried the hod, as I say, whose backs were broken. These are people such as cleaners who had intensive manual labour type jobs who do not fulfil the disability or illness criteria but they are still able to make a contribution and they just want to transition into some form of community-based activity and to be recognised and to receive a payment for that. All I am asking here is that even though the Minister of State says it is being kept under review, we move it beyond being kept under review to maybe a more active policy to engage with that category of workers. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2023-07-06/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:52:07+00:00 Sitting date: 2023-07-06