Patrick O'Donovan (Limerick County, Fine Gael)
Link to this: Individually | In context

What I have budgeted for is that the scheme will start in the second half of next year. The real cliff edge was last week because the cliff edge was the budget. If we had not secured agreement from the Department of public expenditure and reform, that would have been the cliff edge. Thanks to the interventions of a lot of people, including the engagement between my Department and the Department of public expenditure, we convinced people that this is a scheme worth retaining. That was the real cliff edge, and we overcame that. Now we have the quantitative and qualitative analyses, which we are going through at the moment. We have all the submissions, about 19,000 in total, that were made in respect of the public consultation. We are going to design a scheme that will be fair. I said this in Dáil as well. I do not have any hard-and-fast attitudes regarding the scheme, but it has to be fair.

There are the 2,000 people in it, but there is also a control group who are outside of that. There are people asking when their turn will come. We have to be conscious that no matter how much money we have, we are probably not going to be able to cover everybody. There are things that we will consider, such as whether it is time limited or whether it is people that are churned out. I will consider it in the round based on fairness and the amount of moneys that are available to me. The Deputy can see in the budget line last week that I have a half year available. Over the next four years, that will incrementally grow as we have full years available to us. It will also give us an opportunity to reach out to more people.