Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Amendment No. 15 is important for us. While we accept that the compensation will not be treated as a reckonable payment within the meaning of the social welfare legislation, a particular concern arises. If an individual cannot access the infrastructure that the Minister of State is providing to ensure that his or her rights are achieved, the process is not worth the paper on which it is written. If people must go a long time without being able to feed their families, pay their rents or cover other costs before judgments are made, they will be radically disempowered from raising their concerns in the first place and we will end up with hundreds more Muhammad Younis cases. At our meeting on Tuesday, someone from the Irish Immigrant Support Centre, Nasc, indicated that 30,000 people were in this undocumented space, although not how many were experiencing these levels of exploitation. It is important that people have the financial facility to access the process. Otherwise, it will not be a real opportunity for them.