Heather Humphreys (Cavan-Monaghan, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputy Ó Cuív for raising all those questions. I will try to take them but he should come back to me if I leave any out. As the Deputy will be aware, there has been a significant investment in the PUP. At its peak in May 2020, more than 600,000 people were availing of the payment and, as restrictions were eased, the numbers dropped to just over 200,000 in October 2020. That clearly shows that as the economy reopens, people want to get back to work. The future of the PUP continues at current rates and remains open for new applications until the end of June. The Government will set out the future of the PUP in the coming weeks, probably at the start of June. As one might imagine, I am talking to my Government colleagues about a pathway out of the PUP. We will soon have a better sense of how things are going with the vaccine roll-out, the number of new cases and the trajectory of the virus, and we will also have a clearer picture in terms of the numbers returning to work. We have been clear that there will be no cliff edge for people. We certainly have not been found wanting as a Government in regard to supporting people who have been out of work through no fault of their own. I will meet my Government colleagues in the coming week and we hope to make an announcement in early June.

The current number of people receiving the PUP is 345,000. We project that the unemployment number on Friday, 25 June, will stand at 523,281. We estimate that 330,047 will be on the PUP and 193,234 on the traditional jobseeker's payments. This estimate was based on assumptions made in April 2021, before the Government announcements on 28 April that have seen the reopening of sectors of the economy, with a significant number of exits from the PUP. We are doing much better than we had anticipated because the economy has reopened.

As the Deputy will be aware, the Christmas bonus is announced at budget time and is not provided in the Estimates. The briefing provided to the committee shows last year's expenditure without the bonus to aid comparison. The decision to pay the Christmas bonus is something the Department and I discuss with the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform and its Minister, Deputy Michael McGrath.

On the cyberattack issue, the Department has a full-time information security team, headed at principal officer level, and operates an information security management system, developed to meet the requirements of the industry standard ISO 27001. The Department adopts a security-by-design and defence-in-depth approach to cybersecurity, meaning the system and networks are designed and built with a view to minimising the risk of a security breach. Operational practices are developed and deployed to identify and deal with any breaches that may be attempted. The Department ICT systems are fully operational and are always monitored from a cybersecurity perspective. The recent HSE cyber incident has not affected the Department's core payment systems.

Out of an abundance of caution, the Department has deployed extensive additional cyberdefence mechanisms to provide additional reassurance. Nothing abnormal has been detected to date. The Department's information security team continues to monitor events closely and is liaising with the National Cyber Security Centre. This is an issue of which we are very conscious in the Department and much work goes into it. Sometimes we are criticised when we make announcements because there may be a lead-in time to putting those payments into effect, but one of the reasons there is a lead-in time is we have to build the system securely to ensure there are no cracks where hackers can get in. We are conscious that these criminals - they are criminals - are becoming more and more expert in their work, and we continue to monitor the issue closely at the Department. We are conscious that we hold a large volume of data and that the work we do is very important to people's daily lives.