Willie O'Dea (Limerick City, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I move amendment No. 6:

In page 13, after line 38, to insert the following:“Review of Bereavement Grant

17.The Minister for Employment Affairs and Social Protection shall, within 6 months after the passing of this Act, prepare and lay a report before the Houses of the Oireachtas reviewing the abolition of the Bereavement Grant and setting out the options for restoring those grants.”.

This is a worthwhile amendment but I apologise because I do not want the Minister to come back from Brussels or wherever she is and find that she suddenly has to write about 172 reports. We discussed this on Committee Stage and there were two things missing from my proposal then. One was a timeline so I have rectified that and put in six months. I think the Minister suggested on Committee Stage that I should have been more specific in what I was seeking but, for whatever reason, that does not appear to have happened.

The loss of the bereavement grant resulted in €25 million being taken away from assisting people in the event of a death. I was talking to somebody at the weekend after a sad funeral in Limerick, and I assure Deputies that it was a no frills funeral. I imagine it was the cheapest possible funeral but when a member of the family volunteered to me how much it cost, I was absolutely shocked. It is getting more and more expensive to die. My own family had a sad bereavement recently and it brought home to me that when a family member dies, one has grief, anguish and pain. In that situation, one does not want to be going around to credit unions seeking to borrow money or, worse again, going to some vulture of a money lender who will clean out a person looking for money. I have come across problems at constituency level and I am sure others have also. There is a gap between the amount the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection is prepared to pay towards the cost of funeral expenses and the cost of the funeral.

We will have to focus on that next year. Due to the lack of specificity, if that is the correct word, in my amendment, I will not press it.

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