"I HAVE never done anything this positive in my life before," says Michelle Hickey.
"I have things to offer prospective employers. It's up to me to sell those things to the employer," says Paul Maguire.
The speakers exemplify the sort of spirit to be found among participants in an innovative training course being run at Ballymun Jobs Centre.
The course, called Workmate, is aimed at early school leavers and unemployed people over 40 years of age, the two groups in which unemployment is rife. The early schoolleavers have no formal qualifications to offer.
Unemployed people over 40 must cope with ageism and many of them, too, have no formal qualifications.
Workmate aims to give both groups a boost in the jobs market. It is one of the many projects run by the Ballymun Jobs Centre in north Dublin, a community project which has placed 2,300 people in jobs since 1987.
Workmate was launched with the aid of the European Social Fund in 1993 and is aimed exclusively at those aged 15 to 28 and who were early school leavers.
Of 130 young people who have taken part, more than 40 per cent have gained full time employment or training and 15 per cent have returned to education. This success prompted the extension of the scheme to people over 40.
Michelle Hickey, a single parent and early school leaver, had returned to Ballymun after two years in England where "I was doing bits of cleaning jobs".
She heard about Workmate, joined the programme "and didn't come back for a couple of weeks. Then Noel knocked on my door."
Noel Purvis is on the Workmate staff and made a big difference to Michelle by not writing her off because she didn't turn up.
When we spoke to her she had progressed through Workmate to the point where she was about to start a FAS/Aer Rianta work preparation course at Dublin Airport. She had also learned to use computers and had been bitten by the computer bug.
"I want to get as much knowledge about computers as I can," she said.
Paul Maguire has been bitten by the bug, too. "I had never seen a computer before 1989," he said.
"Now I am pretty competent with them and am very interested in working in that area."
A member of the over 40 Workmate group, he says: "There are very few jobs I can walk into. They are not recruiting 40 plus. Most people like us are looking to set up our own business.
He worked originally in catering and stuck at it for 6 1/2 years, although he hated it. Then he worked for CIE "on the buses." He left after five years and "I did odds and ends after that."
He was out of work for most of the 1980s, but he is no slouch and he did his Leaving Cert, an accountancy and a computer course.
Then he hit the age barrier. He could not get replies to applications for jobs, let alone interviews. But he sees himself as a trier and he went on applying.
He recalls one period when, he says, "I got three replies out of 250 applications."
Workmate helps him to prepare for job interviews and has opened up good training opportunities in computers. When we spoke to him his hopes were high that something positive was about to happen.
He retains his faith in himself and his abilities. He even sees his age as an advantage to prospective employers if only they could be persuaded to see it: "The person you are more liable to be able to keep is the person who is that bit older and relieved to have a job in the first place."
Michelle is also convinced that Workmate has made all the difference. Without it, she says, "I don't think I would have done anything. I was stuck in my own little rut."