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

I would like to reinforce what has been said by the Chair regarding the role of public representatives. It is very interesting to stand back and look at life in the round. If I go down the main street of any town, I will find solicitors, tax consultants and accountants. Very few people who have big tax issues make the appeals themselves or deal with their own taxes. It is normally signed off by tax consultants. When I walk down the street, I do not see anybody who specialises on a commercial basis in social welfare advice. The only people providing such a service are the citizens advice centres and ourselves as public representatives. I think that as public representatives, we play a very important role. The vast majority of public representatives - no more than solicitors, accountants or anyone else - have informed themselves of how these schemes work in order to assist those who come into them. If a person has no case, the public representative will tell them that they have no case. Sometimes you have to go around in circles to prove there is no case for the doubting Thomases, but that is what you do. There is no point in fooling them because it will bounce back to you eventually and you will have put a lot of time into nothing.

The people among the population who are dealing with the Department's schemes can have significant mental, physical and intellectual disabilities. We are talking about people in all sorts of situations. It is fair to say that we probably deal with a higher number of people who are illiterate, and cannot read or write, than the tax consultant who deals with someone who turns over €5 million per year. This is the reality we face. We get people of all shapes, makes and sizes in our clinics. In the generality, they are not the well heeled or the well educated, although some of them are. We try to explain the thing to them. We ask them to get this bit of paper or that bit of paper together. It has gotten a lot worse. We advise them to tell their doctor what things are needed to meet the criteria. We say, "I do not know if it is true or not, but that is what the doctor has to measure". We try to explain it to them. We do everything at one remove. Therefore, it is perfectly valid for public representatives to write the appeals. We do what a tax consultant would do, which is to submit the appeal. We need to make sure they sign it before it is sent out. They either send it back to us or send it into the Department. It is only when we are doing these clinics, and I do not know if everyone else's constituents are as mixed a bunch as mine are, that-----