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

Christmas should a time of joy, but for huge numbers of people it is a time of extreme financial pressure and hardship. James, who has worked all his life, had to go on a jobseeker's payment because of an injury that left him unable to do his old job. He went onto the back to education allowance. He has a wife and three children and because the Government has excluded people who have been on jobseeker's allowance for less than a year or who are on back to work and enterprise allowance, back to education allowance and illness benefit from the one-off cost-of-living payments and the fuel allowance, people like James and his family and thousands of others on those payments will have to endure all the cost-of-living hikes, the high bills and the cost of Christmas without getting the Christmas bonus, the fuel allowance or any of the one-off payments, including the double week payment in January. That is just not fair. I am asking, as I did last year, and we got a bit of movement last year-----

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