Mary Hanafin (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)

Increasingly the Government is anxious to try to bring it into line with some of the differential rents at local authority level. Some of those are, for example, €26 or €27 per week. When the levels were set in 2004, it was designed to be at approximately 10% of the social welfare rate and, having stayed the same over the last number of years, the new levels are only 8.8%.

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