Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I concur with my colleagues regarding online forms. We are all slower when filling out a strange form and we often wonder what information the questions are actually seeking. I have seen this with people with PhDs and so on. If a person has filled out a form 50 or 100 times, he or she knows the information the questions are asking for. Many Deputies and Senators print off a form and start filling it out by going through the questions in such a way that the person for whom the form is being filled will know what is being put on it, or they start filling it our for their constituents on verbal basis. I often do this in my constituency clinics. When a form is filled, we send it to the constituent, who signs it and submits it. The Department gets a better filled form but a Deputy or Senator cannot submit it online for their constituents because he or she cannot authorise it. I often fill out various forms, such as pensions forms, manually for people. Since we fill out forms so often, I would hope that we fill them out to a good standard.

One thing I could not understand is that I encountered somebody in the entertainment business who did not have much formal education and who wanted to do a one-year course. I could have understood the Department's response if it had been a three-year or four-year course because we hope the pandemic will not go on that long, but in this case it became a choice between getting a basic payment of €203 or forgetting about that and going on the course. The individual could not afford to do the course without the payment. It seemed to me a pity that if somebody was forced to be at home, he or she could not do a course of up to one year in duration. I am not making the case for degrees, etc., because they last for three or four years and the pandemic is not expected to last that long. We do know, however, that in the entertainment business, even if everything is resolved, it will be a slow burn before everything gets back to normal because the one place people will still be reluctant to go will be into a crowd, even if there are vaccines and cures. I expect restaurants will open up faster than crowded entertainment venues, particularly indoor venues. I realise it is a policy issue and that there is a policy formulation. I would be interested in hearing about this.

I still want to discuss the mortgage interest supplement. We were told the Department of Finance made arrangements with the banks but it was only pushing the can down the road because the mortgages still have to be fully paid. Would it be possible to go back to the Department and ask whether it could send this committee the rationale, in 2014, for getting rid of two complementary schemes, namely, the rent supplement scheme, which supported the unemployed in paying rent, and the mortgage interest supplement scheme, which traditionally, or for as long as I could remember, helped those with a mortgage who became unemployed? Perhaps the Department would send us the rationale for why there was a suspension in 2014. I have dealt with welfare for many years but I could never understand the decision. It was the strangest decision when it was made because, let us be honest, the crisis from 2008 onwards was largely about mortgages. I have always believed we would have saved a lot of hardship if the scheme had been continued or had been beefed up.

The famous four-year plan we developed at the end of 2010 strengthened the mortgage interest supplement. There was not an awful lot in it on this but there was a sentence that referred to strengthening the supplement because it was seen as the best safety net for those with a mortgage. Something similar has happened now, but in a different way. The mortgage interest supplement, which used to last for as long as a person was unemployed and ended the minute he or she went back to work, meant that person had no accumulated interest and would not be going cap in hand to the financial institutions, which are not charities. I just do not understand the rationale for the suspension. Maybe somebody in the Department could give us the policy reason for it.