The small business lobby group, ISME, has called for a refocusing of unemployment strategies after publishing a list of 335 companies willing to sponsor a long-term unemployed person.

The chief executive of ISME, Mr Frank Mulcahy, said that the Government was not marshalling effectively the information it was gathering on unemployment and that ISME had the mechanism to facilitate work training programmes.

The efficacy of current training and back to work schemes was "fairly miserable', he said. "The unemployed are now a valuable asset to industry and we want to work closely with the representatives of the unemployed and the individual members," he said.

The initiative was given a cautious welcome by a spokeswoman for the Irish National Organisation for the Unemployed (INOU), Ms Mary Murphy, who said the current Local Employment Scheme (LES) pilot network needed a national direction "as to where it's going and to what its role is".

The ISME pilot survey of 400 companies found that 88.5 per cent, or 354, were experiencing labour shortages, and that 84 per cent, or 335, would be willing to provide work experience to people unemployed for more than 12 months. The group is now seeking meetings with Government departments to implement the scheme.

ISME's chairman, Mr Peter Faulkner, said there was now nothing unusual for SMEs to advertise even for semi-skilled jobs and not get a response.

He said the majority of the unemployed had fallen between "the plethora of schemes that currently exist".