Marc Ó Cathasaigh (Waterford, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister for her presentation and for the supplementary material, which sets everything out fairly clearly. Much of it is self-explanatory. It relates to a Christmas bonus and the continuation of the Covid measures. That can be clearly seen in the figures. It is worth saying that it is not all bad news. The performance of the Social Insurance Fund and the PRSI take are very welcome and show that there is potential for our economy to rebound. We are already seeing that rebound in our tax revenues. That is helping us deal with some of the burden of the ongoing restrictions.

I have some questions. There is an increase in funding for the non-contributory State pension of €20 million. Expenditure on the domiciliary care allowance is increasing by €3.2 million. Am I to assume that these changes relate directly to the increased budget allocations for those payments? I imagine that is straightforward.

I have a question on PUP recipients, which I asked the Minister when dealing with Supplementary Estimates this time last year when we were all hoping that Covid would be in the rear view mirror by this point. Do we have information about the PUP recipients? Do we know what age they are, what sectors they work in or where in the country they are? Are they on the scheme intermittently, coming in and out of it, or are they on it constantly, remaining on it for a long period? If they have remained on it for a long period, there must be a reason they have not transitioned onto a jobseeker's payment. What does that tell us? Are they better off on the PUP? I would imagine they are because otherwise they would have made the transition. Does that tell us that we are looking at younger people or at people whose partners are still at work? As we try to unwind the PUP and deal with the scarring to the economy, all of that will be very important.

Speaking of scarring to the economy, one of the sections that jumped out at me and made me sad was that on working-age employment supports, the community employment, CE, scheme, the rural social scheme, the back-to-work enterprise allowance, the youth employment support service, the back-to-education allowance, JobsPlus, the local employment services, jobs clubs and the work placement experience programme. The spend on all of these has decreased massively because the economy is not reopening in that way. My question relates to the longer term. We know there will be scarring in the labour market. These traditional employment supports are not in place in large measure at the minute. Is the Minister planning ahead? When this pandemic finally ends, will she have some sort of action plan ready to put in place so that those people who may have been distanced from the labour market during the pandemic will have an opportunity to find their way back in?