Aengus Ó Snodaigh (Dublin South Central, Sinn Fein)
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I will follow up on the last point about the mechanisms for this and other social welfare legislation. I welcomed the fact that the budget was brought forward to October. I have been my party's spokesperson on social protection for some time and have had to deal with guillotines being applied to virtually every social welfare Bill in the last ten or 12 years. On rare occasions, the No. 2 Bill or the Bill that usually appears in May or June has allowed us some time to consider the legislation properly. The Minister might remember that last year we still ended up with a guillotine, despite the fact that the budgetary change was supposed to allow us to have a number of weeks, if not months, in which to consider social welfare legislation - from October to December. However, because the Government had lost its majority in the Seanad, it brought the Bill forward, guillotined it and forced us to deal with the legislation without proper time and consideration.

In this instance, there is only one aspect that requires the haste that we are seeing with this Bill - namely, section 16, which the Minister rightly said refers to the EU directive from 2010. The directive was passed on 7 July 2010 and was supposed to be implemented within two years. The Minister sought an extension of two years. Despite the fact that the directive was passed in 2010, the Government has failed in all of the legislation enacted in the two years since 2012 to address it and now, at the last minute, we are addressing it. It is not our fault that this Bill is being rushed. The Bill itself, in the main, other than the section we are dealing with here, is not very controversial and should not take a lot of time to debate. In fact, section 16 itself is not particularly controversial and could have been a standalone Bill in itself, albeit a very short one, which would allow us to pass the directive. Most of what is contained in the Bill is a tidying up of other legislation and the social welfare code and could have been included in other social welfare legislation to be debated now or in the future.

The timeframe is very tight for the Department, the Bills Office and ourselves in terms of putting together amendments and dealing with the complexity of the social welfare code. One has to access other legislation and try to track back over the changes. It is a pity that this aspect of the Government's promise in the programme for Government is being flouted again.

To turn to the issue at hand,there is obvious merit in some of these changes. It is important to ensure a good exchange of information between An Post and the Department so that An Post has the ability to deter fraud, along with the Department itself. I welcome that aspect, but the problem is that An Post is being deleted from the primary legislation and is being replaced with the term "payment service provider". There is an inherent danger in that. An Post won the contract, but part of winning it was that it was specified in legislation that it was the payment provider.

If it had not won it, the Minister would have had to change the legislation because it would no longer have been able to address what was set out in law. If nothing else, I believe it has to have prepared bidder status, given the recognition of its role. The role may be economic and commercial but, in particular, it is a social role. There is no guarantee that anyone else who may win the contract in the future in six years' time would have the same attitude and ethos of An Post. From what the Minister has said so far, she is treating An Post as just a commercial entity rather than as an integral part of a public service delivery mechanism. It is not similar to Bank of Ireland or Rabobank, and that difference needs to be recognised. That is what was acknowledged in legislation. The effect of section 3(b) is to delete the provisions of section 5(4) of the Social Welfare Consolidation Act 2005 whereby: "Any expenses incurred by An Post under Part 2 (determined on the basis that may be agreed on between the Minister, the Minister for Finance and An Post) shall be paid by the Minister out of the Social Insurance Fund to An Post...". In effect, the Minister is deleting the reference to An Post and substituting "a payment service provider". This is repeated further on when the Minister deletes from section 242(1)(c)the words "in consultation with An Post, the payment of specified benefits through An Post" and substitutes "the payment of specified benefits through a payment service provider", and in the insertion by section 3(f) of the phrase " ‘specified agency’ means a payment service provider..." instead of the original definition in the Social Welfare Consolidation Act 2005, which states: " "specified agency" means An Post...". The Minister may seek to continue the good relationship with An Post as the preferred agency but another Minister may not in the future.