Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail)

I answered that question comprehensively with facts and figures on Committee Stage of the Bill we debated during the early summer. However, I will send the detailed facts to the Deputy. These show that the week in question was not exceptional in terms of the number of people not signing on. Off the top of my head, around 90% of the people who did not sign on that week were Irish. Of the rest, some of the applicants were from faraway parts of the world, such as Pakistan, India, Australia and America, which does not fit in with the "cheap flights" idea. If anything, the figures from that week show that few people were discommoded by the ash cloud. The data shows that it is not true that thousands of people are flying in to collect social welfare payments. All the evidence is that because people must now collect unemployment payments every week - they must physically attend the post office and provide their identities to the postmaster or postmistress - that is not the area in which the greatest savings are to be made.

As the Deputy knows, we have done a lot of work on control savings. As I said in my reply, in the early part of the year the control measures were in place and savings were being made but, because of the industrial action, these savings were not reported. It did not make any difference to the savings that were made on the ground, but it did make a difference to the reporting, and that has affected the figures.

See this speech in context