Michael McGrath (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail)
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I will group my last two questions. With regard to Ms Fahy's work with the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, what role does personal debt play in the whole situation? Obviously, many people who rely on support from the St. Vincent de Paul are experiencing unemployment and are in very low income households, but not all I suspect, and many would have very high mortgages, credit union loans, credit cards and so forth. To what extent is Ms Fahy meeting people who, because of their determination to pay the mortgage and pay other forms of debt, find they simply have no money to pay the energy bills, groceries and so on?

On the issue of the social welfare appeals office, Ms O'Sullivan highlighted the very high number of appeals, which reached 53,000 live cases last year, the highest since the office was founded in 1990. She said the success rate on appeal, at 55%, was an indicator of poor standards of decision-making in the first instance. I did not realise the success rate was that high in the social welfare appeals office. Surely having such a high rate of success through appeals is providing an incentive to people who get refused at the first hurdle to appeal, and this is just clogging up the system.