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

First, the Deputy raised the anomaly that exists for people returning from maternity leave to the wage subsidy scheme. From what I can gather, and I only heard it at the same time as the Deputy when the Minister for Finance said it in the last session, the Minister is bringing a memorandum to the Cabinet tomorrow. The issue has been resolved and the announcement of how it is to be resolved will be made after agreement has been reached in the Cabinet.

With regard to the arrears, as I said this morning it involves individual access to individual applications. The Deputy will be aware that there are 589,000 people on the Covid payment at present. To carry out individual analyses of what people are owed we would need hundreds of staff and weeks to get through them. We are trying to draft an IT script that can go through our IT system with an algorithm to identify the people who are owed payments and the various payments they are owed, and then to make a payment. It will be as fast as we can get that script to work. That might be weeks or it might be longer, but to do it in the normal way we would have to take all our staff from what they are doing currently and get them to go through batches of paper applications. That is not productive. However, I assure everybody that if people are owed any money, they will receive it. I cannot give a definitive date but it will be as soon as we possibly can do it.

Anybody can apply for jobseeker's benefit or jobseeker's allowance. There are some people today who might be financially better off in the social welfare system than they are by receiving the €350 pandemic payment. As it was only a temporary income, and we obviously hope that the vast majority of people will go back to work, we have not been processing the applications that people have made on the first day or first week they came in. Anybody can apply for jobseeker's benefit, which is accrued as a result of the contributions the person has made. If people do not have enough contributions they can apply for jobseeker's allowance.

I refer to the myriad supports that go along with that base rate such as qualified adults and qualified child allowances, rent supplement, medical cards, fuel allowance and back to school allowance. The Department gives myriad supports to people who are temporarily out of work and they are able to access them at any time.

With regard to those over the age of 66, the current legislation of the land, which is the legislation that I have no choice but to work under, denotes that our working age payments exist between the ages of 18 and 66. Those are the contributors to the social insurance system. Those are the people who have access to employment activation sources and recruitment services that we use through our Intreo offices. That working age category is between 18 and 66 and can only be changed by legislation, which is the reason we were adamant to include those over the age of 66 in our temporary wage subsidy scheme. Regarding those such as self-employed people aged over 66 who could not re-employ themselves, for argument's sake, we gave them access to the supplementary welfare allowance scheme, which some of them have applied for, and we are looking favourably on them because we have lowered the means test threshold with regard to that scheme for them. If the Deputy knows people who need extra money because their outgoings or their business expenses are more than their income with regard to their pension entitlements, I ask him to, please, make sure that they contact their local Intreo office and we will deal with them and help them in any was we can do so.

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