Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

Negotiations are ongoing in the Labour Relations Commission in regard to the community welfare officers. They will become full civil servants and they will be community welfare officers. On the matter of whether changes are required to the legislation, I will return to the Deputy on that. First, we must achieve the integration of the service. The community welfare officers have a potentially extremely valuable and important role to play in improving the services of the Department. The number of people getting special needs payments and the amounts of the payments have grown significantly in recent years. It is perhaps an area which could be reviewed but first we want to get the integration of the community welfare officers into the Department and that in itself is a big job. There will be up to 1,000 extra staff and that will be a big change for the staff in the Department of Social Protection. Obviously it will be a very big change for the community welfare officers. There has been a fair number of meetings of senior staff in the Department with community welfare officers and I am very anxious to see them successfully joining the staff of the Department.

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