Dara Calleary (Mayo, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

In my own name I have tabled a question about the availability of community welfare officers. I got some information last week that shows many people do not have access to a community welfare officer within their area. The service is being centralised. People do not have access to transport to get to the central service. It makes no sense to do what the banks are doing and tell people to go online because many people do not have the capacity to go online or do not have the availability to go online to engage with community welfare officer.

Will the Minister increase the number of community welfare officers available? They do fantastic work and their commitment to their job is immense but we need more of them. They need to be out and about in communities more and have the capacity to do that. These schemes are useless without the community welfare officer being actively available to people. A number of charities have highlighted the difficulty in getting access to a community welfare officer all because of the burden of work on the existing community welfare officer service. If that is not expanded, we are going nowhere.

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