Ms Yvonne O'Sullivan:

FLAC has worked on the area of social welfare appeals in the last number of years and published a report in 2012 entitled Not Fair Enough. Senator Ó Clochartaigh referred to the view that if a person was initially refused it might save the public purse money. However, people appeal to the Social Welfare Appeals Office where appeals end up in a backlog of cases. The appeals office takes on a huge burden in terms of trying to address the high volume of appeals. Within that, there is a certain poor level of decision making because approximately 21% of all appeals are revised by deciding officers anyway and go back to the Department where they are successful for the applicant. That shows that there is a very poor standard in regard to some of the decision-making in the Department at first instance.