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

I will try to talk quickly. I appreciate the Deputy's support today. It is not ideal, and I wish we had more weeks in the payment of the four-fifths rule so we could bring in what will probably be the decision next week or early the following week by the Government, but those decisions are being worked on and are imminent. They will be made very shortly. However, I can confirm that the payments will extend beyond the June date as we gradually move through the phases. When we introduced the PUP it was not to get plaudits or thanks. It was done at such breakneck speed to get money into people's pockets, and we did that. It is not perfect, and we all know that, but we cannot take something away from people when we still have not given them the opportunity to return to work. That is the basis of the decisions that will be made and I hope that gives the Deputy some comfort. I apologise that I cannot tell him what I am proposing, but it will be within the next number of days. I hope everybody can understand that.

I wish to dissociate myself from anybody who has wrongly intimated that there are people gaming the system. Yes, there is fraud in the system in the same way as there is fraud in the system in every other country. One can see from the newspapers that the police are catching some of those people, but they are small numbers. There is nobody gaming the system. Nobody will have his or her payment taken away if the person cannot go back to work because of a variety of reasons that might stop him or her, such as childcare, underlying health conditions and so forth. All those matters were enshrined in the payment when it was established and they are not going to be suddenly whipped away because we reach a phase next week in which it is going to be rolled over.

People have been enormously helpful in the country's fight against this virus. The Government must recognise that and pay tribute to them for the last couple of months, but we must also recognise that this was established as an income support. Some people are getting more from it than they would have been earning in income. I agree with the Deputy. From my perspective, all that does is highlight some of the reasons that we had difficulty with part-time workers.

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