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

All my Department is doing is making people on the PUP aware of the various supports that are available. There are a lot of supports and there is no point in the Government putting them in place if we do not tell people about them. It is all voluntary. If a person is confident that his or her job is coming back, that is fine, but if someone needs help, we are here to help. That is the one message I always want to get out: social protection is there to help people when they need it. That is what we do. What we are saying is that people should have a look at what is available and if there are supports we can provide, we want to help.

The staff in the Department of Social Protection have been absolutely amazing during the pandemic. We paid out €8 billion. More than 24 million individual payments have been issued and almost 900,000 people have received support under the scheme. The work that has been done by staff in the Department of Social Protection has been outstanding.

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