Mr. Paul Savage:

I thank the Deputy. The short answer is “No”, for a couple of reasons. The Minister referred to the rationale last month when he was before the committee, and I mentioned it earlier. It is that we want to ensure the systems in place are fully in place, that all the elements are working and that they are fit for purpose and permanent so they will work again for the next round of payments. The Minister was clear that he did not want to have temporary solutions, fast or quick-and-dirty-type payments, or manual payments because he wanted to ensure the permanent fixes were in place. To be frank, at this point we are almost at the end of paying people. With regard to the effort involved even in paying people half the payment upfront, we would not know exactly what would be paid in each case until we processed the full thing. We do not know exactly what the money would be. When we would finally calculate the payments, we would be in the same situation we were in last year with interim payments, whereby the Department could end up having to recoup money from some. It creates many issues and problems and does not deal with the situation permanently.