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

I am sharing time with Deputies Devlin, Brendan Smith and Niall Collins. I want to be associated with the remarks the Minister made about the departmental officials. They have worked very hard in difficult circumstances and have performed their duties very efficiently. If the Minister does not have time to answer all of my question now, she might respond in writing.

What is the Government's intention in respect of the €350 per week Covid-19 payment? Is it due to be extended beyond 15 June and, if so, for how long? If and when the Government decides to terminate the payment, will it do so in a tapered manner or will it let people fall off the cliff, immediately back to their pre-existing rates of social protection? Are there proposals to change the eligibility criteria for either the illness-related or the PUP?

Another question that arises relates to arrears. Quite a number of my constituents, as well as others from outside my constituency who have contacted me, have mentioned that they have not been paid from the beginning of the pandemic for one reason or another. In many cases, it is because they made applications IN writing and were told to apply again online. When will those arrears be paid?

As the Minister will know, quite a number of people who receive means-tested payments work part time. They are entitled to receive the full Covid payment - €350 per week - plus their pre-existing level of social protection. The Department has signalled that in cases where a person's income from employment is less than the €350 per week, there will be a clawback. That sum, according to my calculations, could run to €1,000 or more in many cases. This will be presented to people who have suffered a dramatic reduction in income. Take, for example, someone who is moved from €350 to his or her pre-existing social welfare level, having lost his or her job at the same time. Does the Government intend to proceed with this and, if so, in what manner?

The Department has conceded that the increased level of unemployment will require renewed concentration and labour activation services. Are there plans to extend the range of apprenticeships or to introduce some flexibility into the community employment scheme? Despite some recent changes to the scheme, it remains notoriously inflexible, particularly in an era of what we project to be high unemployment. Will the Minister give an assurance that local employment services will be at the front and centre of the labour activation effort that will take place? What is the position regarding Turas Nua and Seetec? Their contracts were supposed to end next December. Will they be gone next December or is there a possibility that they will reappear in competition with the local State-funded labour activation services?

I would like an answer to those questions.

There are a number of other matters I want to raise but the time constraints do not allow me to go into them in detail. For example, I understand that it is the policy on all sides of the House to encourage people to work, whether they are self-employed or employees, beyond the age of 66. I look at those over 66 for whom, through no fault of their own, the businesses they work for have closed down due to the Covid-19 pandemic or their own businesses have closed down, and yet they are not entitled to the Covid-19 pandemic unemployment payment nor are they even entitled to a top-up of their pensions to reach the Covid-19 pandemic unemployment payment. That sends a bad signal to people who we are trying to encourage to work beyond the age of 66.

On pensions generally, the Minister was pursuing a number of initiatives before the election, such as auto-enrolment, which is badly needed. Has the timetable slipped on that? If so, by how much has it slipped? Where are we on it? Where are we with the total contributions approach? It was expected that approach would be introduced by the middle of this year.

Has any thought been given within the Government or the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection to the idea of protecting the poorest in this society against increases in carbon tax? The increases in the fuel allowance are an inadequate way to do that.

Has any thought been given to the question of indexing social welfare, not to the headline rate of inflation but to something such as average wages? The Minister will be aware that if the gap between people on social welfare, the poorest in the country, and people in other parts of the economy is allowed to widen, then poverty and inequality will be widened.

Is the Minister aware of the implications for her Department of the recent actions by Debenhams, which employs 1,000 people in this country? Debenhams Ireland made its staff redundant in the middle of the Covid-19 situation and Debenhams UK then removed all of the assets from the Irish company, leaving the Department, or rather the Irish taxpayer, with a huge bill for statutory redundancy. Are we, as a State, going to stand aside in the face of this blatant daylight robbery? Does the Government have any position on that?

As I am on the matter of redundancy, the Minister will be aware that under the legislation we passed seven to eight weeks ago, people who become redundant during the Covid-19 period are precluded from applying for redundancy within the normal four-week period. They are delayed from doing so until some unspecified time in the future which has yet to be decided. Would it not be only right and fair in view of those circumstances that companies should not be allowed to make people redundant during the Covid-19 pandemic? If they wish to or have to do so afterwards, then so be it.

Those are some of the points I want to raise. As I said, I do not have time to go into this in detail because I want to accommodate my colleagues, but I want to remind the House that this week, 584,000 people received the Covid-19 pandemic unemployment payment, 44,600 people received the illness-related Covid-19 pandemic unemployment payment, and in addition to that, ordinary social welfare payments such as jobseeker's benefit and jobseeker's allowance were paid out to 215,000 people. That is 850,000 people receiving unemployment support, so a lot of the population is affected by the measures taken by the Government and it is time we had detailed scrutiny of the matter, which is why I am delighted we are discussing it in some detail next week. I hope the Minister can answer some of those questions in the interim.

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