Aengus Ó Snodaigh (Dublin South Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I recognise the Bill as, in the main, positive. There are changes in it which reflect the fact that our social welfare system is quite complex. Whenever changes are made there can be unforeseen circumstances and not all of the intended changes can be captured in the legislation. Some of the Bill is a tidying-up exercise because legislation has given rise to the need to delete a duplication. In other cases, two or three different Acts need to be dealt with. I understand the civil registration aspect of the Bill deals with one of the changes where there is a mention of an ard cláraitheoir.

My colleague mentioned one of the unforeseen consequences. In 2011 we debated the increase in the number of contributions required to qualify for the contributory State pension from 260 to 520 and the change to whole-of-work-life measures.

We are changing the nature of pension provision in the Bill. The problem is that there is no mention of it because we never discussed it. The reason we did not discuss it is because it was quite traditional at the time for the social welfare Bill to be rushed through or guillotined so we never reached it. We never reached it on Second, Committee or Report Stages so there was no discussion and teasing out of the implications of some of the changes. I welcome that for the past number of years, at the very least, there has been no attempt to guillotine Bills and we can properly tease out their effects. I recollect that I mentioned that I have a problem with this; I do not know what is. That might sound silly in some ways but because of the complexities of our pension system and our social welfare system, my gut instinct was this was going to affect a certain cohort if it was introduced as quickly as it was because it came into effect a year later.

All of us with constituency offices can see women in particular turning up and asking what happened because they do not have a full contributory pension. Yes, they can apply for the non-contributory pension but it has affected them and I would appeal to those looking at this to make a greater effort to inform people in advance. I know some people in the pensions section have made an effort to inform people in advance that they are short but there are a lot of people who will not be informed early enough to allow them to make up the difference to reach the 520 contributions. In one person's case, thankfully, she was informed early enough and had three months in which to make up three contributions. It does not sound like much. She had 517 contributions and was told seven years previously that she had enough contributions at 260. As far as I remember, she had 500 credits - whatever use they were to her because they were useless in terms of contributions. She managed to get an employer to take her on for three weeks at the age of 65 or 66, managed to make up the amount and was assessed based on lifetime contributions.

The second part - the lifetime contributions - was interesting because she had taken a number of periods off for childbirth and to look after her children and that affected the full amount. I will not tease out all that but I congratulate those in the pensions section who have the foresight to look at people's pensions in advance and inform them. There is no system, as there was years' ago, where someone could buy the contributions. Perhaps that could be looked at again and a cost put on it. Perhaps it is too costly or complicated but perhaps it could be looked at, particularly in cases where people are falling short by ten or 20 contributions in terms of qualifying for payments they made, because at the end of the day, some of these people worked for 30 years but it might have been a case of ten weeks here and ten weeks there. It takes 24 weeks to qualify.

Section 19 records the country of birth and citizenship when somebody dies. It might be worth recording citizenships because some people go through a number of citizenships. The explanatory memorandum mentions that this might be used in the future. I know people who are Pakistani or German and who then became Irish citizens. There are people who have moved around. It is a simple change that could be looked at.

The guardian's payment is a very good step but I have a problem with the fact that it still mentions orphans. The reason why it is called a guardian's payment is because of a campaign by myself and others to stop it being called an orphan's allowance. It talks about giving a payment to an orphan but in many cases, the people concerned are not orphans. They are the children of people who are not in a fit state to look after so to all intents and purposes, they are abandoned but the Government is not going to use the term "abandoned children". It is about language. It was not accepted that this was the reason for the change.

The issue of welfare cheats is one of the key issues. As my party's spokesperson on social welfare for a number of years, I argued for more social welfare inspectors and still do. There is no reason for the change here. If someone is convicted of welfare fraud in a court of law, every single newspaper up and down the country will publish their name. The tabloids will broadcast it to the world so it is superfluous. If one wants a register, that is fine but one needs to be very careful going down this road because an appeal takes place later on. A person can be convicted today but they will have a number of months in which to put in an appeal. If we put that person's name on a register, we are condemning them. I give the example of a woman who came to me in absolute distress. The Department was looking for €20,000 from her for overpayments for 13 years. She asked me whether I still had a document she gave me 13 years' ago. The data protection people here told me I should not have it and that it was in breach of data protection regulations. I had the document, which was from the Department and which stated that former Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, had sent this letter, which was attached to it and said to sort this out and pay this woman the money and recognised the conditions and whatever else. This was the proof she needed to show that she did nothing untoward when the Department told her she had pulled the wool over its eyes and had never mentioned it. It was there in black and white 13 years later.

We should be careful. I heard Deputy Michael Healy-Rae talk about overpayments earlier. We are going back years If I overpaid the tax man, I would only be allowed to go back four years. Beyond that, the tax man can keep it whereas it is different when the State makes an overpayment even when it is the State's fault. In many cases we talk about, and we have had this argument before, it happens because of bureaucratic mistakes. Sometimes it happens because the person did not provide the documentation on time and sometimes it is fraud. If it is fraud, we should prosecute and recover it. I have no problem with that but we should be very careful when it comes to going down the road of the State becoming another court of law. There is enough bad material appearing in newspapers that leads to these people being sued. We do not want to contribute to that by publishing names ahead of schedule. If they are guilty of fraud, so be it. As I said, the newspapers will condemn them.

In respect of the other changes, there are issues around defined benefit schemes and the fact that companies continue to move towards defined contribution schemes. Any protections for defined benefit schemes should be introduced along with anything to prevent companies from moving to the lesser defined contribution option. We should not help anybody to move towards closing those schemes, which have stood the test of time, when it is only for the benefit of companies rather than workers.

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