Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

The Deputy made successful representations to me, on which I congratulate him, to continue departmental funding for the Northside Community Law Centre. I have been in it and met people there on a number of occasions. The work it does on social welfare issues and appeals is very important. We have transformed the way the domiciliary care allowance is handled. After becoming Minister, I brought in the parent organisations to discuss issues in detail and the biggest issue was dealing with children on the autism spectrum. On the advice of parents, we changed the forms and timeframe during which applications and appeals were made. As a consequence, the backlog of new applications has been eliminated. The same is true of carer's allowance. The working system in Longford has been transformed and we also transferred to new IT platforms. This caused an additional delay, but the outcome has been well worthwhile.

I am not sure what could be achieved by putting the system on a statutory basis. The appeals system was reformed in 1990 when the social welfare appeals office was established as a separate and independent executive with its own premises and staff. Appeals are now made directly to the office, where previously they were made to the Minister. The chief appeals officer is legally obliged to submit an annual report and appeals officers are quasi-judicial officers required under law to be free and unrestricted in discharging their functions. Some applications could be much better prepared.

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