Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE) | Oireachtas source

I wonder whether the Minister of State has seen Ken Loach's fine film, "I, Daniel Blake", which reveals in horrifying detail the impact of a tiered system such as that being proposed. In the UK, it is called a work capability assessment; in the Green Paper, it is called a work capacity assessment. In effect, they are the same. When I asked the Taoiseach about this, he said "I, Daniel Blake" was a good film but it was one-sided; in other words, he was suggesting that perhaps some of these people may, in reality, be trying to scam the system.

The Minister of State said Intreo officials will carry out the work capacity assessments and that engagement with public employment services will be voluntary. If he has been listening to disabled people, he will know how negative their experiences with Intreo have been in the past. The proposal is to force people to jump through more hoops for Intreo into the future.

What does it mean to say it will be voluntary engagement where Intreo will have the power to categorise people into tiers and people will be left with little power to challenge this? The Minister of State said we should not worry and that nobody's payments will be cut. That might be the case now under this Government, but if we establish this tiered system we create the basis for cutting people's payments in the future, as happened in Britain.

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