Thomas Pringle (Donegal South West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome that guidance and I hope it gets out to all the local offices. However, the situation remains that people are being identified within local offices as self-employed farmers, which automatically implies they have no entitlement to the jobseeker's benefit. This situation has caused extreme hardship for many people. If my office has had to deal with 17 cases, there could be many more that have not come to the attention of a Deputy or many others could have accepted the response from the local office and lost out on entitlements. This issue needs to be addressed in the local offices and people should not be classified as self-employed when they are not.

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