Social Welfare Schemes Dail Éireann — 2026-02-26 ============================================================ John Paul O'Shea (FG), Cork North-West I thank the Minister for those figures. They are partly along the lines that I thought there were, consistently around the 2,700 mark between all the areas. The challenge for us as a Government is to try to get those people back into the workforce and working with the activation officers. It will be important to see if we can work on those. The challenge that I see and the trend is that many young people end up in unemployment now. I hate to see that. I would like to see them getting involved in work placement programmes, further education and training, employment services, or community employment programmes such as Tús. Community employment is very important indeed. I thank those who work in the Intreo offices, trying to engage with people on jobseeker's benefit and jobseeker's allowance to try to get them back into the workforce. It is important and we need to continue those good efforts. --- 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/2026-02-26/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:42+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-02-26