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

I will make one brief point. I am not surprised the Department is finding it hard to get people onto the rural social scheme at the moment. A change was made when the six-year cap was brought in. That cap, judging from what the Minister of State says, is now totally unnecessary because the Department does not have an over-demand for places, which was the argument in favour of the cap, that is, to create churn. However, it also created uncertainty for people in their lives.

The reason there is no demand for the scheme is quite simple. Initially, when one went on the scheme, as long as one qualified one got the payment because one was doing 19 and a half hours' work. One got the full basic rate for oneself, for one's partner if one had a partner and if he or she was a dependent adult, and for the children. Then the Department changed the scheme. This affects people with partners; it does not affect single people.

The Department told people they would get the basic rate of €203. If, however, one has a dependent adult or a dependent child, the only benefit of going on the scheme is the top-up of payment of something over €20 a week. So people on the scheme do 19 and a half hours' work for a €20 payment. When they take up employment, even on this scheme, the Department claws the whole thing back off them. If they earn €100 a week on their farm, which is not a huge farm income, the Department effectively takes €80 off the payment. That is all it pays them, net.

Who is going to work 19 and a half hours a week for €20? There was a huge demand for the scheme before that because these are farmers who, no matter what they do with their land, will never be independent of some other off-farm income. That is just a fact. Before that, once people qualified, they got the full payment for the 19 and a half hours and got free of the means test that bedevilled them under the farm assist in respect of the claw-back of 70%. I suggest that the Minister gets out the rules as they were originally written and the changes that were made and looks at them. I think that was in 2016. I will sit down with him anytime and go through that with him - because the first rules did not happen by coincidence or chance - and I think he will see that it is totally unattractive to go onto the RSS if one has a partner or dependent children.