John Cregan (Limerick West, Fianna Fail)

I am pleased to have an opportunity to welcome this important legislation. The social welfare package of €900 million provided for in the Bill represents almost half of the Government's current expenditure. I am pleased that we will spend so much money in this area. I congratulate the Minister for Social and Family Affairs on the package. Like his colleagues, I am sure he has had many tough meetings with the Minister for Finance in recent months. All Ministers tried to get as much as they could for their areas of responsibility. The Minister, Deputy Cullen, has worked hard at a time of tightening finances to ensure he could deliver respectable increases across the board to social welfare recipients. An example of the welcome measures which are being put in place is the increase in the old age pension. The Taoiseach has made the provision of such increases a core value of Fianna Fáil. The last Administration kept its promise to increase the pension to €200 per week. The current programme for Government sets out an ambitious target of €300 per week. I am delighted that the Minister, Deputy Cullen, has started to work towards meeting that target by providing for a generous increase of €14 per week, which is very welcome.

While I do not intend to patronise the Minister, it is worth mentioning the service given to backbenchers by the Minister's office and the other offices in the Department of Social Welfare in Dublin and throughout the country. Much of the work of Deputies involves trying to deal with the thousands of queries we receive each year. The queries need to be dealt with quickly because in many cases people depend on getting payments which have been delayed or on qualifying for various schemes. It is important that we have an efficient system for dealing with such cases. It is important to recognise that at this point. All Deputies have experience of tabling parliamentary questions or making representations to the Minister's office and we usually get an efficient acknowledgement of our query, followed by a holding letter and then a quick final response.

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