Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I wish to reassure the Deputy that we consult very widely with the kind of community organisations to which she referred. However, it should be borne in mind that we took over a service where we had 1,000 community welfare service officers, many of whom handled not just special payments and rent, but also social welfare assistance. As we move to the new model - this should be good news, it was done with a number of offices last year and it is proposed to do it in a large number of offices this year - what happens is that people who come in for social welfare assistance have their claim dealt with within a couple of days or a week at the most.

As the Deputy knows, people who took the traditional community welfare route often had to wait quite a number of weeks before they got whatever payment they were due. This is a very big change in the service, but it means we can now use the talents and resources of the community welfare service officers to help people getting back to work and education and to take up opportunities such as community employment, as well as providing the traditional service. The assistance services will largely be integrated into the offices, which will free up time for a more targeted person to person service for each person in receipt of a social welfare income.

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