Denis Naughten (Roscommon-Galway, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I do not believe that in principle there is a reluctance in the Department to facilitate supplementary welfare supports. I know the Minister is committed to ensuring this is as flexible as possible but the reality on the ground is different. The first thing I would ask her to do as a matter of urgency is to have a remote meeting with every community welfare officer in the country to relay to each and every one of them that they need to be as flexible as possible regarding financial supports for families that are struggling. The difficulty is that we as Members of the Oireachtas are finding individual cases where people are being denied supports and there is no measure to reflect that in the statistics provided by the Department. The fact is that if any community welfare officer deviates from the means-tested support, that has to be accounted for separately within the Department. We are asking for this information to be directly collated and provided to the Oireachtas. The Minister needs to relay to each community welfare officer in the country that this is being measured.

There should be adequate income going into every household. That is the objective behind the social welfare system. We can talk all day about whether that is adequate or about anomalies. The reality, as Deputy Ó Cuív has noted, is that there are addiction issues in households where there is allegedly sufficient income going into that household. We have all come across cases of coercive control where there is sufficient income going into the house but the mother and children are not the ones receiving that money. We see it with regard to domestic abuse. If the Government is clearly stating that it wants to take a different approach to gender-based violence, it must start with flexibility regarding this payment. It is not just about a different approach being taken by community welfare officers. I can give the Minister examples of the very worthwhile system she has put in place regarding the rent allowance scheme for victims of domestic violence where that has been denied by community welfare officers because they were not aware of the scheme. If they are not aware of the something very basic like that, my concern is that some of them will not be aware of the comments the Minister is making about the flexible approach that should be taken with exceptional needs payments.

We need community welfare officers to go back out into local communities. It is pointless to expect a family with no access to money to do a round trip of between 50 and 80 miles to get to a community welfare officer - they do not have the money to put petrol in the car to get there in the first place. If there are issues relating to coercive control, a person will not have access to the information to fill out the six-page form. That person may not have access to a phone to make that call in the first place. Community welfare officers need to take a far more flexible approach. I ask the Minister to have a remote meeting with every community welfare officer in the country before the end of this month and clearly convey to them her priority and that of Government and every Member of the Oireachtas.