Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I kindly thank the Minister of State. To be quite honest, whoever in the Department wrote the reply must think I know nothing about the social welfare. They have informed me about all the schemes that the Minister of State and I know about, and that every Deputy the House knows about because we deal with them every week. It is a little bit patronising for the Department to dodge the issue. What did it say about the nub of this issue? It made a bald statement that qualified adults do not have an entitlement to cost-of-living bonuses, including the spring bonus, in their own right. "Yes" Minister and "No" Minster. Before Christmas there were double payments and someone with a qualified adult on their payment got paid.

The two points I am making here are about the cost of living. Is the Minister of State telling me that pensioners, invalidity pensioners, any of the people with disabilities and so on with a dependent adult did not face the same cost-of-living increases as everybody else? Of course, they did. Is the Department suggesting that to me? In this case, some of these people might have had and probably had an underlying entitlement to a payment in their own right but they opted for the one because the Department carefully always claims it will give the one that is optimal for the individual. Having opted for the dependent adult, they have found that in this case they lose out. It is very simple.

I will not ask the Minister of State to waste his time going through another supplementary answer with a whole lot of further bumf. I ask him to go back and ask the Minister to review this on two bases: first, because, as I said, people have made choices on the basis of the best option; and second, and more importantly, couples in a household face the same increase in costs irrespective of whether it is primary payment on the dependent adult or two primary payments. The third issue here is that this will cost very little. If the Minister of State just stands up and says he will raise the transcript of this debate with the Minister he can sit down and we can go on to next Topical issue and we will save my good colleagues here a bit of time in the House.

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