Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

As the Minister knows, huge numbers of families are being hammered with the cost of living, energy costs, food prices and so on, and the centrepiece of the Government's response to that has involved telling people to get exceptional needs payments. Pre-Covid, if you needed something like that, you would have a face-to-face meeting with a community welfare officer, CWO, whereas that is no longer the case. As a result, people desperately in need of support have nobody to talk to, and that needs to be remedied. It is a criticism not of any of the staff but rather of the lack of staffing and the lack of front-line personnel to deal with vulnerable and desperate people.

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