Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

On the last point, I was asked about the operation of social welfare inspectors at airports. The question applied only to that. Some people were under the impression that it applied only to people coming into the country but in several cases it applied to Irish people who had left the country but continued to claim and came back regularly to do so. My comment related only to that situation and not to anything else. I brought in legislation to allow social welfare inspectors to ask questions of people who appeared to come in regularly to the airports for the purpose of claiming social welfare. We have dealt with between 140 and 150 cases since the legislation was brought in. Some of those cases have appeared before the courts and have been covered fairly extensively in local and national newspapers.

On the amendments, the Department will claim from compensators who would normally be insurance companies that portion of the claim which relates to the Department's paying somebody various kinds of benefit such as illness or injury benefit. This is a standard practice among social security agencies in the rest of Europe. It should probably have been introduced in Ireland a long time ago. The principle is that nobody should be compensated twice. In other cases the compensator, the insurance company, might not reimburse the Department but might in some way or other be the beneficiary of an additional benefit.

The HSE cases to which the Deputy alluded are very specific and I will not comment on them except to say that at local social welfare offices the staff are very sensitive because there is often a great deal of local knowledge which particularly in the case of child abuse have been the subject of widespread local and national publicity. These are sensitive family issues and I will not go into them in detail but the Deputy may continue to liaise with me about those cases.

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