Kieran O'Donnell (Limerick City, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I will give Ms O'Donoghue my perspective on this, which is very simple. We are dealing with this on the ground every day of the week. The vast majority of people getting social welfare payments go about it in the normal way. Many of them are struggling and are under an awful lot of pressure. However, there are abuses of the system. For example, 84,000 people were on rent supplement at the end of June this year. What is the average length of time a person is on rent supplement? Is it six months, a year, two years or three years?

The majority of people on rent supplement are totally above board but have fallen on difficult times. However, there is a very small cohort of people who crop up all the time - I am sure it is the same in every constituency - and they move from house to house. The landlords are as culpable as the tenants because they are renting dives and hovels. These people wreak havoc when they move into a neighbourhood. We cannot pull the rent supplement because it is not our role. We are making a payment to the tenant; we are only a conduit providing the funding to pay the rent. For the life of me, I cannot understand why the rent is not paid directly to the landlord, so he or she is held in some way accountable.

As Ms O'Donoghue is probably well aware, RAS has, by and large, worked for myriad reasons. Invariably, there are proper controls and the houses are of a very good standard. However, a small group causes untold havoc with the rent supplement scheme. The same names crop up all the time. It is unfair to the reputation of the scheme and to the people availing of it and it gives them a bad name. I have a major problem with that. For some reason, they appear to be able to abuse the scheme. I have no doubt this is nothing new to Ms O'Donoghue and she has heard it before but it appears to continue. One could pull rent supplement based on perhaps Garda reports and one could pay the rent supplement directly to the landlord. Something must be done. Is this new to Ms O'Donoghue?