Seán Fleming (Laois, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

We all get letters from people who have been approved for home help but are on a waiting list until funding becomes available. We need that figure, broken down by CHO region too.

The next item of correspondence, No. 2502, is from Mr. Ronan Murphy, the chief executive of Horse Sport Ireland, HSI, dated 23 October, providing a detailed response to a request for a timeline for the implementation of the recommendations of the Indecon report, Review of Certain Matters relating to Horse Sport Ireland. HSI states that the recommendations were implemented between August 2017 and 2018. We will note and publish this. There is a lot of data there so I suggest that we note it for now and if any member wants to take it up in further detail, he or she is free to do so.

The next items of correspondence, Nos. 2503 and 2526, are letters from Mr. Jim Meade, the chief executive of Irish Rail, dated 23 October and 6 November, respectively. The correspondence relates to the public services card and in particular, to a case that was referred to at our meeting on 26 September. Included in the correspondence is some detail on how suspected fraud is dealt with by the organisation. The letter is claiming that what was said at the Committee of Public Accounts meeting was untrue and inaccurate. Based on the information given at this meeting, everybody here acted in a totally reasonable manner and assumed certain things. There is criticism of me in the letter but I was giving Irish Rail the benefit of the doubt that when it issued a bill, notice or charge to somebody it did so on the basis of knowing how many trips were taken. I was giving the organisation the benefit of the doubt rather than suggesting that it was issuing bills willy nilly, without knowing how many trips were taken. In the letter received, Irish Rail says it is untrue to say that it had details of the trips taken by an individual, which is surprising. The follow up correspondence, No. 2526, states that Irish Rail issues a fixed penalty notice in circumstances where a free travel pass is cancelled but a person continues to use it. This has highlighted the fact that there is no proper exchange of information between the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection and the CIE Group in order to make sure that free travel cards do not continue to be used when they are no longer valid. It takes months for this information to be provided to Irish Rail and Mr. Meade refers to the fact that people can be using withdrawn cards for years. There is something very seriously wrong in the co-ordination between the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection and the CIE Group on this matter. Understandably, this has been a learning process for everybody. The letter explains that a fixed penalty notice is based on the period in which the card was being used. If it is, for example, four months since the card was cancelled, Irish Rail sends out a notice for four months although the individual may not have ever used the card. Irish Rail says that there is a separate situation whereby a passenger who fails to deliver up a valid ticket on a specific day when requested to do so by an authorised officer will be issued with a fixed penalty notice. This is separate from a debt, which is a civil matter. The correspondence to which I originally referred related to an actual debt. On the debt issued, we do not have the exact details of how that was calculated and Irish Rail has not offered those details. We asked for details on the fixed penalty notices that were issued in 2016, 2017 and 2018, the amounts paid and the payments outstanding. In summary, the situation for last year was that 12,000 notices were issued and 6,000 were paid. The value of the fixed penalty notices issued was €1.7 million and the amount paid was €0.7 million. Less than half of the fixed penalty notices are paid but more to the point, we want details on the bills that Irish Rail issues, that is, what it calls debts. It issues bills for what it terms "a debt due" and we want the same type of information on those bills, namely the number issued for each of the three aforementioned years, as well as the amounts paid and the amounts outstanding. It will be helpful to us when we get that information. We will also ask the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection later today about the exchange of information. We were told at a previous meeting that the travel companies know the details of all the trips taken using the card but do not know the name of the person. The number on the card is anonymised but the Department can relate the number back to the public services card and it knows how often it was used. The CIE Group of companies and Irish Rail are saying that they do not have details of the person's individual travel.

The outcome of all of this is troubling. Whether it is a fixed payment notice or a debt, Irish Rail is issuing bills to people that are not connected with the number of trips those people should not have taken and for which they did not pay. Those bills were issued on a time basis or some other method. We will come back to this issue. We will get some information from the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection and then we will conclude our work on this matter as soon as we have that further clarification. I will continue to pursue this because I raised this issue and I was referred to in that letter. We will get further clarification. We will note and publish the information.

No. 2504 B is from Mr. John O'Sullivan, chief executive and Commissioner of Valuation, Valuation Office, dated 23 October 2019, providing the further information we requested regarding appeals, adjustments to valuations in 2017 and 2019 and the rateability of car parks in supermarkets and shopping centres. These issues have been mentioned and there is interesting reading in this document. Mr. O'Sullivan makes a distinction between his role as the Commissioner of Valuation and his entirely separate role as Accounting Officer. I can understand how people interested in filling stations along the motorways have an interest in this area. A letter was written to Mr. O'Sullivan on this matter and he is stating that there is misunderstanding of his separate roles of Accounting Officer and Commissioner of Valuation. Is that a valid separation of duties?