Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

If someone is found to be behaving in a fraudulent manner, his or her benefit will be suspended almost immediately. In the clip from the documentary which I saw some of the people featured appeared to be somewhat chaotic. They could be individuals who have specific issues such as addiction problems and so on. I want to stop all of what is going on in this regard because it is undermining the free travel scheme for pensioners. The scheme is cherished and valued and the Department makes an extremely important subvention or payment to CIE in respect of it. I understand it is worth approximately €75 million per year to the company. That is a big spend and we do not want it to be undermined. We are obliged to wait for the OPW to roll out the IT required and convert the offices for which it has responsibility. If this can be done as fast as possible, we can issue many more cards. I hope that by the end of the year we will have been able to issue up to 600,000. It is going very well. We also have an arrangement with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in respect of those who are retired and in possession of passports. This means that we could actually use the photos from their passports to be put on the new services cards. We could do this because recent passport photos are of biometric standard. If we were to take this course of action, it would also speed up matters.