Ms Niamh O'Donoghue:

At the moment, public services cards are predominantly issued by invitation. We communicate with different segments of our customer base and invite them into a public services card centre if we feel that they are in a position to travel to a centre. For a small proportion - or maybe a sizeable proportion - of those we consider as very low risk customers, where we have opportunities to validate information from other sources, we do what we call a reduced process. For example, for certain cohorts of pensioners where we were confident they had gone through a passport application and we were able to access the information from the Passport Office and cross-reference it with the information we held, we offered them the possibility of a reduced process, so they did not have to physically present themselves face to face. Up to now, for the vast majority of people it is by invitation. We hope, before the end of summer 2015, to create an online appointments system whereby people who want to have a public services card can go online and make an appointment at a place of their choosing and come in and go through the registration process. Obviously, the critical issue for people who are not social welfare customers is to have an incentive to do so or have an incentive for the card and, as I say, we are working with other Government Departments to do that. It is a requirement for all new and existing job seekers to go through the registration process. It is part of the application for the jobseeker scheme that one goes through the PSC process. If a person is an existing beneficiary we will write and invite him or her over a period of time.