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

That is not the case. There are 585,000 pensioners in the country and we pay weekly payments to approximately 1.2 million. Either way, I will come back to the Deputy with a written answer on that, if that is okay.

The next three things that the Deputy asked about, with the exception of the question of arrears, might be nice asks but the reason I have to say "No" is because they all require changes in legislation and unfortunately, not only do I not have the ability to draft legislation at present, I do not believe the two Houses have the ability to pass it. On that basis, I must say to the Deputy that the governing rules for the back-to-education allowance that currently exist will be the ones under which adjudications will take place on 1 June when applications open until the end of September. Unless we change the legislation between now and September, I do not think the rules can be any different.

On the question about thresholds, unfortunately there are always cliff edges. Thresholds are set and determined by the House in establishing the legislation. They always penalise people who might be just a few quid over or under the threshold. It is something I encourage the Deputy to have a look at, with a view to bringing forward some legislation in the future.

The Deputy also asked about redundancy issues. I have a memorandum going to Cabinet tomorrow and I will make an announcement thereafter, if I get Government approval for it.

The Deputy also mentioned arrears, as I believe did other Deputies, including Deputy Brady. The arrears, and the calculation thereof, is a process that involves sitting down, while observing social distance, with a couple or a person who is on the pandemic unemployment payment as would be the case when doing a jobseeker's benefit application. The establishment of arrears is a time-consuming and staff-consuming process. We do not have the staff at the moment and, when we do have enough staff, we want to redeploy them to do other stuff on activation. We are writing an IT script to address the issue and that is taking a little bit longer than we anticipated. We hope to have that IT script ready in the next number of weeks. It will be able to go through the algorithms of our wonderful system and pull out the data on exactly how many people are owed how much and then be able to issue payment to them.

Deputy Brady mentioned a lady to whom a particularly large amount of money is owed. Would the Deputy mind giving me her details later? We can certainly talk to the relevant community welfare officer and give that woman money in the interim. Anybody who is owed anything will be given it once we get that IT script working.

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