Martin Kenny (Sligo-Leitrim, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Chairman and the committee for allowing me the opportunity to speak today. I am not a member of the committee but it is an issue about which I am highly concerned. Mr. Micheál Ó Giolláin is a neighbour of mine from Ballinamore and I am very conscious that MABS in Ballinamore, County Leitrim, has done tremendous work for many people down the years and I have worked very closely with them. As Deputy O'Dea has said, it is really about the volunteers who are on the board and how they network. There are people there from social welfare, the Garda Síochána, the local credit union, the Irish Farmers Association, the Irish Countrywomans Association and a whole range of organisations. It is broad and it encompasses everybody. People work together and it is seen as being part of the community. In other words, it is a community response where the community comes together in a generous way to help people when they fall on hard times or get into trouble. That is how it is reflected. The danger is that presenting MABS as changing to a regional structure would take that away. On a gut instinct the majority of people would be opposed to that.

I would like to raise a couple of issues. There was mention of the Comptroller and Auditor General, the Revenue requirements around employment, the requirements of the Departments around how money is spent and that due diligence must be carried out in these matters. I take it that the 51 MABS companies must do their returns and make sure that they are done correctly. There have been no issues. I spoke to someone in Revenue off the record recently and asked whether there was a problem with MABS not doing their returns correctly. I was asked where I had heard that and was told there has never been a problem with MABS beyond the occasional late form, as happens in every organisation everywhere. I was told the broad thrust of it was there is no problem with MABS and the individual companies around the country were doing their job properly. That is the information that has come back to me.

It was mentioned that there will be no closure of any service or change to the location of any service during the lifetime of the restructuring programme. I would like to get an idea as to what is that lifetime. How long will that take? Why put that in there if there will never be a change? That suggests to me there is an intention to have changes once this restructuring is over. That is the logical conclusion of having that sentence in there in the first place.

It was mentioned that there have been complaints about how some of the MABS organisations have been run. I would like specifics on that. About which MABS companies have there been complaints and what is the nature of those complaints? That has not come to the fore up to now. One fear I have is that what this is trying to do is set up the organisation in a way that it can move from being a community-based organisation that is providing a service to the community and the people in it to a more Civil Service-type organisation. I think that is a dangerous path to go down. One fear I have concerns the emphasis that has been put on JobPath and how that has become a private company, in that two private companies are now running that system. I fear this is the direction in which the provision of services to people who have debt problems is going, namely, the State does not need to be involved in this and should step back. That is how these things work out in most cases and I fear that if we agree to take on this restructuring and agree that it is the way forward, we actually are agreeing to go down a path that is very dangerous and which we do not need to go down.

I would like to get the specifics on exactly what companies had problems, the nature of the problems, when they occurred and on whether they have been resolved. We are being told there are problems we have to fix but today is the first time that I have heard that there are specific problems. I would like to be assured that there are problems and if there are, let us deal with them.