John O'Mahony (Mayo, Fine Gael)

I thank the Minister of State for her reply. However, what she described is how the process should work; my contention is that it is not working as it should. The Minister of State mentioned the extra thousands of applications being submitted. Have additional staff been allocated to the centralised processing service to meet this demand? Some applicants are giving up in despair when they cannot get through to the call centre. Others are told to contact their local office only to find the latter knows nothing about the matter and must then contact the central office on the applicant's behalf. Has that part of the service been outsourced? As the Minister of State observed, the online facility is of little use to older people who may not be computer literate.

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