Heather Humphreys (Cavan-Monaghan, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The green list is not a list of holiday destinations and the public health advice is still for people not to go abroad. UK holidaymakers discovered last week that while they were on a Spanish holiday, Spain was removed from a green list, as were all the Spanish islands, and moved to the red list. These people have now returned home to a 14-day quarantine period they had thought would not be in place. As the Government has stated, the green list in Ireland will constantly evolve. Like everything else related to Covid, everything we do will be kept under review in line with public health advice. Holidaying at home is the safest thing people can do. I want to be clear that everything I do is in line with public health advice.

I will deal with the changes to the payment. In early July, we moved to a two-tier system, which meant that anybody whose earnings before the pandemic were less than €200 received a payment of €203, while anyone earning more than €200 continued to receive the €350 payment. That system remains in place today. There have been no changes or cuts to the payment, as some may have suggested. From 17 September, which is still almost two months away, we will have a three-tier system of PUP, which will be linked to an individual's prior earnings. A person whose prior earnings were less than €200 will see no change and will continue to receive the €203 rate of payment. A person previously earning between €200 and €300 will receive a payment of €250, which means that people on the payment will continue to receive more than 80% of their prior income and many will actually continue to receive a payment which is higher than when they were working.

Anybody previously earning in excess of €300 will receive a payment of €300. As I said, these changes will not take effect until 17 September. It is important to remember that as the economy has reopened and people have returned to work, we have seen the number of people on the PUP fall from 600,000 a couple of months ago to 287,000 people today. In the past couple of weeks alone, well over 100,000 people have closed their PUP claims. Provided we can continue to keep the virus under control and the number of cases remains low, my hope is that we will see many more people return to work by the time these changes come into effect in mid-September.

The people aged over 66 who do not qualify for PUP are already receiving a social welfare payment.

See this speech in context