Jonathan O'Brien (Cork North Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I have one question for the Minister as I have to attend a meeting of the Committee on Budgetary Oversight at 4 p.m. With respect to having better services and better engagement with the public and the movement to online services, there have been some good initiatives in that part of the reform. For instance, the waiting period for the processing of applications for Garda e-vetting has reduced from five months to 80% of them being processed in fewer than five days. The service has been streamlined and there are fewer steps involved. The initiative around SOLAS and the education and training boards about centralising the availability of courses has been positive. There is the potential to improve services in other areas but the implementation process is lacking somewhat. An issue has arisen in our constituency offices concerning the submission of applications for medical card renewals online. Some people are not familiar with using that system. Also, the uploading of additional information can only be done if one has access to a scanner and can scan the documents, which is creating some difficulty for people and it is also creating delays. Many more people are coming into our constituency offices asking us to submit their documentation, which is fine, but there are other people who may not do that and may be falling between the cracks.

We have also experienced some difficulty with the system introduced for the choice-based letting scheme. It is a good scheme and offers much more transparency to people in terms of the bid for a particular house. The difficulty relates to people who do not have access to that type of technology. The local authorities are providing space within their own offices for people to go in and bid but we find many people are not using it because they are not familiar with the system and the supports in place. We have also found that some people do not have the necessary literacy skills to access the programme. There are positives with the changes but there are also potential pitfalls. The Minister spoke about listening to people and I wonder how that process works. How is he getting feedback on all these processes to see which ones are working very well and which ones have the potential to work very well but need some tweaking? Will he comment on that aspect?