Willie O'Dea (Limerick City, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

To make a general point on this section of the Estimates, as the Minister said in his opening statement, an awful lot of the payments in social protection are demand-led. Obviously, if someone fulfils the qualifications, one gets a number and multiplies the number by the rate and that is straightforward. This section is one of the smaller items of expenditure, only about 5%, but that is almost €1 billion, which is a lot of taxpayers' money. In this particular section, there should be different metrics. What is being done here is money is being spent to achieve a particular result - community employment schemes, rural social schemes and so on are designed to achieve something. There seems to be no method of measurement, no metric by which one can measure their quality, how they are performing and what they are achieving. If one looks at something like invalidity pensions or State pensions, an appropriate metric to put in is processing times, how quickly they are being processed and so on, but surely the metrics need to be different when we are spending money to achieve a particular result. Surely there should be some mechanism to measure how effectively that money is being spent, identifying what result is being sought and how well this is being achieved.