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

The first thing I have to say to the Deputy, and I hope I do not sound disrespectful when I say this, is that the Estimates are not fictitious. They are based on our guesstimate as to what the outturn of all of the topics within the Vote will be. While there is the elephant in the room of the one payment, it is unfair to call them fictitious. This is what we do every year. We do not get the Estimates exactly right, but I think we get them nearly right every year and we try to do our best again this year. However, I take on board that there is a big missing gap. I hope to be able to fill that gap in the next week or ten days and not just for the Members of this House but for the 589,000 people still getting the PUP each week.

To answer the Deputy's question, I said this already, I do not believe anybody is gaming the system. I accept there is fraud in the system for which we have our control measures and we work on that week-in, week-out with the Garda. However, these are workers. These are all people who on 13 March had a good job as far as they were concerned, but maybe could have been paid better. They were going to work and would be in work today if the country were not as closed down as it absolutely is.

I also reject the narrative that seems to be growing. People will not have their payment taken away from them in the coming weeks if they find they cannot go back to work. Just because on 29 June we happen to open up my local tiddlywinks shop, it does not mean that the people who can work there have childcare. It does not mean that the people who work there do not live with somebody who is compromised. Different people go back for different reasons. As always, the people in our Department will be as compassionate and as empathetic as they always are in dealing with the people.

People may be curious as to why all of the information is not out today. I will put it in context. If we assume at the end of all the phases having been opened that we still have hundreds of thousands of people not being able to go back to work, it would take the Department probably some 12 weeks with 800 staff that we currently do not have - because all our staff are currently busy doing other stuff - just to process a jobseeker's benefit application form for 200,000 people. That is the process that needs to be taken into consideration when we are scenario planning. That is against the backdrop of all the other scenario planning that we are doing; how we are actually going to get people back to work but maybe in the new jobs as the Deputy has aptly pointed out that will be created because of the retrofitting programme that hopefully the next Government will bring about, but also all the other new opportunities that will arise which hopefully will compensate for the ones that might be slower to come back.

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