My party colleagues and I are committed to a fair recovery. We want to get people back to work and bring our young people home but we also want to ensure that work pays. The Cabinet has signed off on a jobs strategy, a central plank of which is the JobBridge scheme. Today I published a proposal to scrap JobBridge. I will outline some elements of my proposal. I ask the Minister to explain the decision to continue and extend the JobBridge scheme because the scheme is displacing jobs.

No it is not-----

It is. It is also lowering pay and creating under-employment in this State. I will prove that with data from the Indecon report which the Tánaiste and Minister for Social Protection continuously quotes to me when I raise concerns about JobBridge and other schemes.

The Indecon report found that 30% of employers said that they would create a job if JobBridge did not exist; that is under-employment. We have also seen headlines about the abuse of the scheme and about the fact that the Department of Social Protection has allowed internships to be promoted which otherwise would have been entry-level jobs. If one visits the JobBridge website today, one will see that six out of the first ten positions advertised are for retail or office staff. It does not take six to nine months to learn how to stack shelves; nor does it take nine months to learn how to pick potatoes in Donegal. I ask the Minister to ensure that the Tánaiste and Minister for Social Protection scraps the JobBridge scheme and reverts to creating apprenticeships and appropriate internships. I also ask him to ensure that her Department, in conjunction with the Department of Education and Skills, ensures that in-work training and in-education training become the norm rather than JobBridge.

It is a good day when Sinn Féin is coming forward with a new policy. We have not seen very much of that-----

That is because the Minister is wearing blinkers. He should take his blinkers off.

I welcome that and look forward to reading the policy. We will see how well it stacks up alongside some of the party's other policies on the economy. It appears now that the Sinn Féin approach to JobBridge generally is that it ought to be scrapped but I understand that the policy proposals published today make suggestions as to how it can be improved or replaced by something very similar. I look forward to considering the Deputy's policy proposals. I also recall that the Sinn Féin leader, Deputy Adams, tabled a parliamentary question asking for the JobBridge scheme to be extended to people who are not on the live register. He did so, I would suggest, on the grounds that he knows, as do many others, that it has been a success. Youth unemployment has fallen by a third since 2012. Under the Pathways to Work strategy, a focused effort has been made to reduce youth unemployment. We are also implementing the Youth Guarantee, having launched First Steps and JobsPlus Youth a fortnight ago. That work is paying off and the facts are there to prove it; they are staring the Deputy in the face. There has been a significant reduction in youth unemployment, from 31% in 2012 at the height of the crisis to 21.6% at the end of 2014. There have been 37,341 JobBridge placements to date and 6,172 people are currently on internships.

There are two points about JobBridge that must be stressed. The scheme is voluntary, both for the host organisation or employer and the individual intern. Second, an individual must have been out of work for three of the previous six months in order to qualify.

Issues have been raised by the Deputy regarding the monitoring of JobBridge and his concerns in this regard are legitimate. None of us wants to see an abuse of the JobBridge programme, least of all the Tánaiste and Minister for Social Protection. If a complaint is made by an intern, employee or someone else, it is investigated and taken very seriously. There have been almost 10,000 monitoring visits since JobBridge started. Of these, 97.5% of internships visited were found to be satisfactory. That means that over one in four placements was monitored. It was not just a dip-in monitoring exercise, but was very extensive. However, out of over 11,000 host organisations, only 44 have been banned indefinitely, while ten have been banned for a lesser period. That represents 0.5% against a backdrop of thousands of monitoring visits. Any individual who wishes to report a suspected abuse of the JobBridge scheme should contact the JobBridge team directly. Deputies can see, from the figures I have given, that complaints are investigated and where a breach is found, severe action is taken.

The scheme has been successful and it is right to quote the Indecon report in that regard, although Deputy Ó Snodaigh quoted selectively from it. The aforementioned independent report found that 60% of those who took part were in employment within five months.

Many also go into further education, training, reskilling or schemes like community employment. The evaluation also found that 96% of host organisations would recommend JobBridge to another employer and 89% of interns stated that JobBridge had given them new skills. It is not a replacement for employment but it is something that can be of huge value in increasing people's self-confidence, giving them an opportunity to gain quality work experience and establish a network of contacts. It is not a job but it takes people a long way along the road to achieving confidence in the market and the workplace.

Internships are not jobs yet the Minister tried to put it across as such. Employers have a pool of free labour that has been created by the Government, the Labour Party in particular. That is what the interns are doing. In the past, it was paid employment and includes those within Departments and local authorities. Previously, this was carried out by civil servants and local authority workers and now it is being carried out by people on internships. Real jobs are there, such as for retail assistants, that were entry-level jobs in the past. People got experience while being paid.

Germany has over 300 apprenticeship schemes, while Ireland has 24. The Government has started to address the issue, which I welcome, but the document states that the work must happen quicker to ensure the inappropriate nature of JobBridge is dealt with. The only way this can be done is by scrapping it.

Will the Minister ensure proper jobs, not JobBridge, are promoted? For instance, JobsPlus is subsidised employment with the subsidy given to the employer. I am fully behind it because it creates real full-time jobs yet the Department and the Government are continually trumpeting free labour. Some 37,000 positions in the past four years have been created. Let us think of that as a subsidy for employers with no benefit in the main. The Minister suggests I was selectively quoting from the Indecon report. If the Minister wants me to read the entire Indecon report-----

We do not have time. A question, please.

I will not do it. It is a substantial document. In the Indecon report, the majority of people who found work afterwards were on a lower wage than their co-workers in employment.

The Deputy has raised a number of issues. Glimpses of reasonableness come out here and there in what he said about what the Government is doing. He is acknowledging fairly that the Government is bringing forward policies in the area of apprenticeships. These are substantive and ultimately will be successful policies on apprenticeships. There was an increase of over 40% in apprenticeships last year and new apprenticeships across the board. I was happy to be associated with the announcement by eircom of 300 new apprentices in that organisation. There will be others in the coming weeks and I hope the Deputy will welcome them.

Deputy Ó Snodaigh talks about real jobs and I remind the House that 330,000 people lost their jobs under the previous Administration. It was the greatest economic catastrophe the Government has ever seen. There was a collapse in employment, in the banking system, in economic activity and in living standards. That is what the Government faced and has been addressing very successfully. Deputy Ó Snodaigh asked about real jobs. Some 80,000 real new jobs have been created since 2011. Deputy Ó Snodaigh is correct to concentrate on unemployment. What have we done? We reduced it from 15% in 2012 to 10.5% in February of this year. By any reasonable person's standard and by any objective standard, it is a remarkable achievement and no Deputy, irrespective of what side he is on can possibly deny it.

Hear, hear.

Members can be critical-----

How many jobs were created on the north side?

Loads.

-----can call for more action, can suggest more needs to be done with JobBridge and can press for more apprentices but they cannot deny the facts that are staring them in the face, which is that the Government has turned around the economy and more jobs are being created every day of the week. No Deputy on the Opposition side can deny it because they can see it in their constituencies. Of course there are real jobs.

To the extent that the Deputy wants us to examine aspects of the JobBridge programme, if he has reasonable criticisms, like his party leader, Deputy Gerry Adams, he could table a parliamentary question on the matter. We will give careful consideration to his report and anything he wants to say.