Brendan Smith (Cavan-Monaghan, Fianna Fail)

I compliment my colleague Deputy Barry Cowen on putting forward this constructive and important motion. As Deputy McEntee said, this is an important issue.

I wish to refer to the comment made by my colleague, Deputy Dara Calleary, with regard to the exorbitant licence fees paid to RTÉ on behalf of taxpayers. There is plenty of room to reduce that subsidy to an organisation where outrageous salary levels still prevail, particularly at presenter level. There is room for dramatic improvement in that organisation.

I am quite a number of years in this House and I appreciate it is not always possible for the relevant Minister to attend. However, it has always been the tradition that an official or senior person from each Department would attend and listen to the debate and bring any urgent issues to the attention of the Minister. The current Government talks about making the Oireachtas and the Legislature more important, yet we are being totally disregarded. We know the debate will be printed by tomorrow, but that is not the point. Officials should be present, particularly when the Minister is unable to attend. This is no reflection on the Minister of State at the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, Deputy McEntee. If the Minister, Deputy Burton, cannot be here - I am sure she has a good reason for her absence - some of her officials should be present to listen to the debate.

My colleague mentioned the huge improvements during the period when Fianna Fáil led the Government. We improved the living standards of people depending on social welfare. There were huge improvements in the rates of payment to people in receipt of social welfare payments, huge improvements in the household package and in the criteria for availing of carer's allowance. All of those benefits put in place benefited hundreds of thousands of people. It was disingenuous for the Minister, on her trip to Donegal, to talk about those improvements being put in place for electoral gain. This was particularly disingenuous considering the many comments she made when she was on this side of the House. Budget after budget, she complained the increases were not substantial enough. In recent years, the ESRI conducted examinations of tax and social welfare measures taken in our budgets and their examinations confirmed on all occasions that those budgets were progressive.

The Minister has been praised recently for saying she had an "army" of inspectors in place to tackle fraud. I am sure she did not mean "army" in the traditional way. Thankfully, we have got rid of paramilitary groups here, and we want to see their remnants disbanded also. With regard to fraud, the Minister is just continuing the good work that was initiated a number of years ago. The Department has been carrying out a successful anti-fraud programme. We want to see that being even more successful. Considerable sums of money have been saved each year from tackling fraud, almost €500 annually over the past number of years. We hope that will be achieved again this year. There are approximately 600 staff in the Department involved in that work.

We all know about the huge pressure on individual social welfare officials, but within our overall public administration there is scope to transfer more people to pressure areas within the Department of Social Protection. The Minister of State will be aware that when I was Minister in his Department, there was a large transfer of personnel from the Department to the Department of Social Protection. There is still scope within the broader public service to transfer people to areas with a heavy burden. Some months ago, when the Minister, Deputy Burton, introduced the Social Welfare Bill, I spoke about the multi-agency checkpoints along the Border, where extra powers were given to the personnel in the statutory agencies involved in those checkpoints. I welcomed that. I represent two of the southern Ulster counties in this Dáil and my colleague, Deputy Kirk, represents Louth, another Border county. We have seen at first hand fraudulent behaviour by people crossing the Border and welcome anything that will eliminate that and ensure that our people on the southern side of the Border in Ulster can compete on a level playing field in regard to contracts, building work and construction work, etc. I commend the Department and all the agencies involved in ensuring that fraud is eliminated and minimised as much as possible.

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