Social Welfare Schemes
Dail Éireann — 2026-02-26
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Dara Calleary (FF), Mayo

I thank the Deputy and join him in acknowledging the superb work being done by our Intreo teams across the country. We will have work and skills events around the country next week. I encourage every Deputy to help to promote those events and to attend the events to see how they work. We are more than happy to show them. We have already had a good discussion this morning about youth employment and the work we are doing with Intreo, and the tailored, individualised employment support that Intreo provides. As the Deputy knows, with the youth guarantee of the European Union, we are pledging to provide a good quality offer of employment, education or training to those under 30 within four months of them becoming unemployed. We are focused on delivering that. We are focused on identifying appropriate training opportunities for young people.
I thank the Deputy and Senator Anne Rabbitte for their engagement with me around redesigning community employment, Tús and the rural social scheme, RSS, to ensure that they offer opportunities to people. As I said earlier, we are currently finalising a new draft of pathways to work. That will look at all the labour market challenges we face, because our biggest enemy is complacency, and we must ensure that our labour market and supports are relevant to the conditions in the market today.

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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