Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail)

I am delighted to hear that. Issues were raised about reasonable offers. That is an issue we can discuss at length on Committee Stage. In order to make the activation part possible I need the ability to weed out those who are not entitled to social welfare. I have great sympathy for the point made by Deputy Ring that there are people whom I would define as being unemployable. There is also a category of people often overlook who are employable in the long term on social schemes but who will never - regardless of the amount of training they are offered - get jobs in commercial enterprises. When we designed the rural social scheme we purposely did not put a finite number of years on the scheme. As well as training schemes, we need work schemes for those who are unlikely ever to get commercial employment. My objective is to try to ensure that as many people as possible, who are now on the live register and are very anxious to go to work, will get that opportunity.

An issue was raised about young people. I have met parents of young people who have not allowed them to sign on to unemployment assistance because they did not want to get them into the habit of getting money every week and doing nothing for the money. They are very anxious that those same young people would be given the opportunity to start somewhere with work. I have great sympathy for those people. I sometimes find it difficult to ask them to sign on and start to draw so that we can get them into the various schemes. Many parents are mortally afraid that once a person gets the taste of the cheque every week, it might become an easy way out. I do not believe many of our young people would succumb to that, but it is a fear that has been expressed to me by parents. I know parents who discourage their young people from signing on to get their entitlements as a result.

We should take the Bill as a totality including my proposed Committee Stage amendments to transfer the schemes to the Department of Social Protection. The purpose of the scheme is to activate people, to weed out those who should be and are not entitled to or for some unspecified reason are not available for work, and to use the savings to activate people and to give places to people who are anxious to work.

I wish to touch on social welfare appeals. I accept it is necessary to speed up the appeals process. We used to have 5,000 appeals outstanding at the end of any year which has now risen dramatically and we are expected to get as many as 30,000 appeals this year. We need to deal with those. At the end of last year we had 16,000 appeals on hand. Everybody knows that if 30,000 and 16,000 are in hand, some 46,000 appeals would have to be dealt with in the year.

In 2009 18,000 appeals were dealt with, so if we continued last year's rate we would wind up with 28,000 appeals left at the end of the year. We have taken a number of initiatives and the moment I arrived at the Department I sought to address the issue. In fairness to my predecessor and those in the Department, they were already working on it. We have assigned two additional appeals officers and there has been an increase in productivity and better work methods.

We have looked at how the work is being streamlined; in a simple appeal where somebody has an issue with the number of contributions, which is a black and white issue, there can be streamlining. More complicated appeals involving means testing and so on can be in a different stream so we can make more decisions on a summary basis, improving the process. There is also significant investment in IT enhancement.

These measures have already had an effect. By the end of April the number of appeals in hand had gone to 20,000 and two and a half months later it has stabilised at that figure and there has been no increase. We intend to appoint for two days a week eight retired appeals officers, which will give us three full-time equivalents. As they are experienced these people can get to work immediately. It is a stop-gap effort and we hope to get back to 16,000 appeals on hand by the end of the year.

We must go much further to ensure that people do not feel the necessity to appeal the decisions and that where there are appeals, they would be finalised in very good time. During my time as Minister I will work hard to ensure that the resources and systems exist to reduce waiting times for appeals. There is a provision in the Bill to deal with that issue.

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