Work Placement Programme Has Helped Only 14 people in South Tipperary in 16 Months – Hayes

Tom Hayes T.D. has strongly criticised the government’s work on job creation in the last two years, and in particular the Work Placement Programme, which has only created 14 placements for people in South Tipperary in the last 16 months since its creation.

“This Programme was set up to huge fanfare and the government have paraded it ever since as being one of their major job creation initiatives. In fact, it could be described as their only job creation initiative.  At this stage, 16 months after it was established, only 14 people have actually started a placement in South Tipperary.  A further 34 placements have been advertised but nobody has been appointed to those placements as yet. When I questioned the Minister about this in December 2009, only three people in South Tipperary had been placed in work experience, eight months later, only 11 more people have been helped by this measure.”

“This is an absolute fiasco from this Green/Fianna Fáil government. This Programme should be seeing a huge uptake from companies and from people who are unemployed, as it stands to hugely benefit both of them. This government started this programme off with far too many restrictions which I insisted were changed last December. They still have not managed to make this programme take off.”

“Any person who is observing the economy in Ireland can see that regardless of technical announcements from economists, this country will not pull itself out of this recession until job creation becomes the number 1 government priority. It seems as if there is no drive from government to make this happen, no commitment to the 9473 people signing on this month in South Tipperary, no commitment to the 450,000 people who are signing on across the country.”

“The numbers that were provided to me by the Department of Education and Science show that only 1321 people across the country have gotten placements – over the course of the 16 months, that is only 82 placements being created nationally a month. This kind of lazy, sloppy measure is simply not good enough. The government needs to push this forward, help people who have lost their jobs get valuable experience and help companies struggling to have new bright employees ready to learn.”