Roderic O'Gorman (Dublin West, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

Regarding what this section seeks to achieve and responding to the questions raised by Deputy Funchion and Deputy Boyd Barrett about why you would send back for more information, this section would primarily apply in a situation where an applicant has made an application, the deciding officer has said their name is not in the database at the moment and asks them to provide information about them being in a particular institution. At that point, as already discussed, an affidavit is the approach that will ground that. What this says is, when the chief deciding officer communicates with the applicant, they are told they have 60 days within which to provide that affidavit. If the applicant does not respond within that 60-day period, a second communication is sent with a second encouragement to provide the relevant information. If that is not responded to, a third communication is sent, after which one more 60-day period exists. There is a 180-day period within which the applicant can respond to the request for information. It is also important to say that, even if that 180-day period lapses and the applicant has not come back, the applicant still has a right subsequently to come back and seek to have the application resumed. There is both a time period of 180 days, the basis of six months, and then a secondary element where people can come back even if they fell outside that time period to provide the relevant information and seek to have the application resumed.

I know that the placing of time limits like this, which the Opposition spoke about, in a scheme of this scale and importance can seem bureaucratic. Dealing with a scheme where we expect about 34,000 applicants and a significant number of initial applications within the system without any kind of conclusion about whether they come to inclusion puts a further burden on a scheme at a time when the priority should be answering the applications and providing the payments and medical cards to those applying under the scheme. It is important to restate that someone can still come back and reactivate their application even if they do not communicate back within the six-month period.

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