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

If I can help progress those cases, I will certainly send them to the Minister. My point is that many of the cases of desperate people are complicated. The case of somebody who has fallen into arrears on his rent because he is paying a HAP top-up, that is, someone whose wife has Alzheimer's disease, who used to work and whose HAP tenancy is based on an income he no longer has, is complicated. It is very difficult to explain on a form or a phone call. You need to be sitting with an individual to explain those complexities. The same is true of a person who is receiving long-term illness benefit when, arguably, he should be on a different payment, and so on. These are complicated cases.

The Minister suggested it is easy to get a face-to-face meeting with a community welfare officer, but that is not the experience we are getting. Sometimes it is not possible even to get one at all.

I do want to acknowledge that, when our office gets on to divisional management, it can be very helpful, but without our assistance, many of those people would not have got payments at all. There is something wrong with staffing levels that we cannot have the availability of more face-to-face community welfare officers who are easily accessible.

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