Regina Doherty (Meath East, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

If Deputy Smith wishes to give me the details of the lady later on, I will intervene.

I am not disputing the numbers cited by Deputy Smith. What I am saying is that we have taken several steps to try to remedy the difficulty we have with regard to a number of issues relating to the length of time for appeals.

The first point is that we need to put more staff in the area. We have a cap on our staff. It is only when staff resources become free in one section because they are no longer required that they can be moved to another section. That is what we did with the carer's allowance and our appeals recently. We are also in a recruitment process for deciding officers within our appeals section. When they come on board that will speed things up. We have also engaged extensively with the Carers Association and carer organisations in the past year to simplify our application form to try to make it easier, as we did with the domiciliary care allowance some years ago, a move that resulted in great improvements.

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