Eugene Murphy (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I join other speakers on the comments about food banks. It is extraordinary and shocking that we see people having to take up food from food banks, although it is great they are there. In fairness to the Chairman, I have heard him speak on numerous occasions on the wastage of food every day in Ireland. The amount of food that is wasted is shocking.

I apologise if my question was already answered in response to Senator Wall’s very important point. I am involved in a social service whereby five of us run a service, which is a really good system of getting meals out, mainly in a wide rural area, to vulnerable people. The Chairman and Deputy Kerrane would also know about this. We do about 600 meals a month. There was an approach from a person with a food bank and who was involved in another area of food. I would not say that person was encroaching, but my point is that ours is a fantastic service and we get huge support from the HSE, which helps to make a subsidised meal. I do not think there is any point in anyone with a food bank, no matter how well-intentioned he or she is, encroaching on an area that is being well looked after. I accept there may be one or two people in the system who fall through the net, but generally in our area and most areas, there are a lot of those HSE-funded programmes. Has the development network had any contact with the HSE? Is there any sort of coming together on that so we would have one, co-ordinated system and not have someone, no matter how well-intentioned he or she is, coming in on it?

I lend my support to Deputy Ó Cuív. Again, in the context of the rural area, when a family are gone away for whatever reasons, an older person may be on his or her own. It may be a mother or father, an uncle or an aunt. This is when it would be important to have somebody at the end of a phone when the person calls services. My colleagues, especially those from the rural areas, will know that sometimes the answering machines not only frustrate older people, the machine actually upsets them. It upsets people when they cannot have a direct contact. As a society we all accept modernisation and how things move on, and we can all get frustrated with these machines, having to listen for ages waiting for a contact. Imagine being an older person in that situation. I know one person in recent months who needed an essential service. We got it straightened out in the end, but she was two months suffering until she contacted me about it. I am sure other colleagues have had the same thing. It really is important we fight for that and that there is somebody at the end of a phone to answer people when it comes to many of these services, and I am referring to State services. The Department of Social Protection is quite good at that but in some areas of essential services some people are falling through and not getting the contact.

I agree that the local employment services are vital and have done a huge job. I would not like to see too much interference with them because they have an important role to play.

On CE schemes, the point has been made to me that people who have been on that scheme in the past year have done very little work due to the Covid-19 pandemic. What is the possibility of that scheme being extended for one year for those people? There will be an issue there for those workers. Perhaps the witnesses would comment on that.