Fergus O'Dowd (Louth, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome this debate and the increased supports for account holders which were announced in the budget. They will all be very welcome. I am aware that many of my constituents are having extreme difficulties in paying their bills, notwithstanding the electricity credits they have received. I was with an employer yesterday who told me that one of her senior staff could not pay her electricity bill, a sum of €3,000. She has a large family and found it impossible to pay, so the employer paid it. There is pain and a lot of suffering out there, and the Government is dealing with it but it needs to do more.

We on this side of the House speak for the people as well. The people I want to talk about are a group the Minister is well aware of since I have raised this matter with him a number of times and last week raised it with officials of his Department. I refer to full-time residents of mobile home parks who are not account holders and do not have individual meters. There is a very small number of them. Many of them are in poor in health, many of them are elderly and many of them have to stay living full-time in a caravan or a mobile home in the middle of winter, which is a very difficult thing to do, and there are huge penalties health-wise involved in doing that.

The Department officials, in my meeting with them, and I welcome the fact that it took place, told me they are looking at a way I proposed of dealing with this whereby, if the community welfare officer, CWO, could affirm that the full-time resident - the person must be a full-time resident in a mobile home park and must not own any other property - is truly such a person, the Department could then find a way of paying those credits to them. They would not get a bill because it is the park owner that rates out the electricity to them and fixes that, which they then pay, so there is no issue, in my view. If they prove their bona fides, there is no reason the Department could not pay the funding. If they need a CWO to identify and prioritise that, that is fine. The difficulty is that the community welfare officer cannot pay that money if those residents have any funds in their accounts. Some of them have €4,000 or €5,000 or whatever to pay for their funerals when that time comes. If you are the rich guy in my constituency or yours, a Cheann Comhairle, if you live in Blackrock or wherever the bourgeois places are right around the country, fair do's to you, you get your credit, so why can the poor permanent resident freezing in his or her mobile home not get it as well?

I have a freedom of information, FOI, request on appeal to the Information Commissioner to find out exactly what is going on in the Department. I will appeal to the Ombudsman in this regard. I should not have to do all that, however. These people should not have to suffer in the way they are genuinely suffering. I accept and acknowledge that the Department is attempting to deal with this again a third time. It has looked after Travellers, and rightly so. It has looked after everybody in the country except these people. There are a very small number of them. They can be easily found. There are some of them in the Ceann Comhairle's constituency as well. I have letters from them.

I thank the Minister. I hope the negotiations with the CWOs will bear fruit and this money can be paid as it should be.

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