Mr. R?n?n Hession:

On the Deputy's first point about customers and citizens, about 90% of our customers are citizens but about 10% are not. There are many people in the social insurance system, for example, who have entitlements but who are not Irish citizens, including people from the UK, from other European countries and from outside of Europe all together. That is why we use the word "customers". The vocabulary has moved on. Historically, we would have used the term "claimants" but we felt it was not the right word because it implied a certain power dynamic. The term "customer" is used in many areas now. I take the Deputy's point but the word is not meant to imply a commercial relationship but to reflect the fact that the people who come to our offices and with whom we deal are entitled to a good quality service from us and are not coming to us in a supplicating way. We are trying to capture that but it is probably just a failure of modern vocabulary that we do not have a better term. It is important to point out that citizenship is not necessarily aligned with the people we serve.

On the question of new versus existing, the Green Paper says that if its recommendations were to be adopted, new people applying to the system would come in under the new regime and over time there would be a transition of the existing customer base of 220,000 people. The paper says five years but it might take a bit longer than that. The idea would be that it would be on a go forward for new claims basis and then a transition of existing customers over time. Of course, if people wanted to transition sooner than that, we would facilitate that. There is a higher payment rate so that is something we would accommodate.

In terms of the concerns, we have received around 120 submissions so far, a lot of them from individuals. We have done a lot of consultation on this. The consultation we did on the cost of disability report was one of the biggest consultations ever done with disabled people in Ireland. We have done consultations recently on the wage subsidy scheme and the reasonable accommodation fund and what we found is that the organisations tend to come in later because they have to engage with their members and they have to go through a process. The early responses tend to be from individuals.

There are lots of concerns coming through, not just in the submissions but also through letters to the Department and the Minister. One of the things we are trying to achieve in the consultation process is to clarify for people what is involved here. For example, some people have been in touch with the Department thinking this was a budget announcement and that it was coming in now. We are trying to clarify this for people. That is why the Minister has tried to be very clear about people not losing payments or seeing a reduction in their payments. While these are very sensitive issues and very sensitive conversations, we do not want people approaching this from a position of needless anxiety. We want to consult and get people's views. We are doing our best to communicate as clearly as possible that this is for discussion, that we are open to other ideas and that the intention here is not to bring in changes to the detriment of people. We deal with disabled people all of the time and we understand the sensitivity of these issues. We know that people may be coming to this process with frustrations caused by other parts of the State system and that affects how they engage. Often we are not starting a fresh conversation and we understand that. We are doing our best to communicate so that people can engage from a position of giving their ideas and their feedback rather than from a position of anxiety. That is certainly not what we want.