Ms Jackie Harrington:

I will go through the questions. I hope I have captured them all. The Department does have access to real-time Revenue data for employees. In the provision for the scheme, in the head that covers the rate of payment, what we are proposing is that when we calculate someone's gross earnings we will go back eight weeks from the date that they were made unemployed, so we will be taking very recent earnings there. We are providing a period of eight weeks, as it allows for people that are maybe paid monthly or the payroll may not have reflected their current payments. We do have that real-time information.

In regard to the self-employed, the scheme is available for employees. Deputy Ó Cuív points out that the self-employed would continue to be eligible for the jobseeker's benefit for the self-employed, which is a relatively new scheme and was introduced in 2019. When we look across Europe, we see a number of countries do not provide support for the self-employed.

In terms of pay-related jobseeker's benefit for the self-employed, the difficulty is that we do not have that real-time information like we do for employees. They have until November of the following year to file their returns so we do not have that information on a real-time basis. It is also reflective as well of the PRSI rates of the self-employed.

On the jobseeker's benefit case, I am aware that a parliamentary question was raised this week as well on the policy in relation to that-----