A chara, - The changes in eligibility for Community Employment Schemes, proposed recently by the Tainiste, Mary Harney, will affect deeply the work of voluntary organisations like ours, which who rely heavily on scheme workers.
Schemes were originally devised to take unemployed people off the live register and give them training to enable them to get a job. However, as these workers have, by and large, been employed on schemes sponsored by voluntary organisations, which are underfunded and unable to employ staff in normal circumstances, they have become indispensable to these organisations in every facet of their work.
To deprive such organisations of their scheme workers is an attack on the work they are trying to carry out and the people for whom they were set up to help in the first place.
We support the efforts of the Scheme Workers Alliance, Mayday and Gingerbread to roll back these cuts. We fully support Gingerbread in its efforts to retain its scheme, the loss of which will cause severe curtailment of services at a time when demand is at an all time high.
These cuts are aimed at the victimised, isolated, deprived and disadvantaged of society and I call on other voluntary organisations to support protests aimed at protecting the valuable work we do. - Is mise,
Paul Coleman, Secretary, Parental Equality, Middle Abbey Street, Dublin 1.