Dara Calleary (Mayo, Fianna Fail)

I thank Deputy O'Sullivan and I acknowledge his ongoing engagement on this issue. In 2024, the Department's deciding officers and designated persons made almost 3.4 million appealable decisions. Of these, 174,000 claims were disallowed or rejected, representing 5% of all decisions, and 40,684 appeals were registered. This represents just over 1% of the overall total decisions. At current registration levels, it is projected we will again exceed 40,000 appeals by the end of 2025. This contrasts with appeal volumes of just over 20,000 in previous years.

The increase in appeal volumes is believed to be attributable to two factors. These are demographic factors leading to higher demand for pensions, disability and carer's payments, and the introduction of a simple-to-use online appeals process. Recognising that neither of these two factors is likely to change, the chief appeals officer has put in place measures to deal with the increase in appeals registered. Twenty additional appeals officers were assigned in 2025. Considerable progress has since been made, with 44,307 appeals finalised by the end of October 2025. This is a 96% increase in productivity on the 22,610 appeals dealt with by the end of October 2024. As a result, pending appeals volumes have been more than halved from over 22,000 in January this year to about 11,000 currently. They are continuing to fall and I continue to monitor them on a monthly basis.

Inevitably, reported processing times increase as the office clears the backlog. However, the average time to process an appeal at the end of quarter 3 of 2025 was 21.2 weeks, which is lower than the average of 23.5 weeks for 2024. Processing times are continuing to fall and once the backlog is reduced, I expect they will fall back to between ten and 12 weeks, which, given the complexity of the issues the appeals office deals with, is a reasonable timeframe.

See this speech in context