Ms Niamh O'Donoghue:

There were cost savings but they were on renting clinics for an hour per week or whatever they might be in a variety of different places around the country. The changes that have taken place have been with a view to improving the service and trying to ensure greater consistency in service delivery. If the Deputy is seeing things that are different, I would welcome hearing about that so we can look at it.

Certainly from what we have looked at, we have consolidated into Intreo service centres where we can, which means that we can offer an appointments based service and we can offer our clinics over a much more prolonged period of time than we would have been able to do when we were dispersing the same number of staff or a smaller number of staff to a whole range of different clinics throughout the country.

The functions of the officers in the community welfare service have not changed. They still have a statutory power of discretion in relation to payments.