Martin Brady (Fianna Fail)

I welcome the Minister and her officials. Money advice centres are similar to some citizens information centres. They offer advice and direction and help people in preparing a household budget. Advisers assist and support people who are trying to cope with debt problems. It is important to note that MABS does not provide financial help, although some members of the public think it does. We must rectify that perception. The service will direct people to their credit union or their local branch of St. Vincent de Paul. The main task of MABS is to enable people to regain control of their finances and to educate them on essential and practical budgeting and money management skills.

The MABS does a good job and I have supported it from its start. However, we should examine some aspects of the service. A call centre was established in Nangor Road Business Park and was opened by the late Séamus Brennan. The centre received 7,000 telephone calls in one year. I am informed that the type of calls received in the centre tend to be from people asking where they should go to get advice. They are told by the call centre to ring their local advice centre. This is a duplication of service and is not good value for money. In the first place people must find out about the helpline, but the helpline then directs them to ring another centre. We should review the value for money we are getting from this system.

Senator McFadden mentioned that clients might call into a centre with a pile of bills. They come to constituency clinics with piles of bills as well. A constituent called to my clinic with an ESB bill, telephone bill and a number of other bills and told me to sort them out. We must be careful that we do not spoon-feed people to the extent that word will go around that if people throw a heap of bills on the table, they will be sorted out. That is not the idea behind the service.

Senator McFadden said Combat Poverty should not be subsumed into the Office for Social Inclusion. I believe it should and agree with that approach. There are various reasons but I will not discuss them now. With regard to MABS, the Department should appoint an inspector of services who could call to offices and have the authority to examine staffing levels, case loads, opening hours and so forth. I notice from the list of offices that many of them are open from 9.30 a.m. to 12 p.m. for administration and other business. Is there a problem with staffing levels? Is an adequate service being provided? Somebody should be appointed to oversee and inspect the service.

There are many agencies under the aegis of the Department. In Coolock, for example, there is a citizens advice centre, which provides information and advice to citizens, an unemployment centre, which provides information about budgeting and so forth, a MABS, a law centre, a resource centre and a family mediation centre. There is considerable duplication of activity in these centres and their operations should all be under one roof. There is a good example in the civic offices in Coolock, which house MABS, the law centre and the family mediation centre.

Some agencies, including resource centres, advertise in the newspapers for community employment co-ordinators and other types of co-ordinators. If one tracks these, one will find the jobs are usually obtained by friends of those already working in the centres. I queried this with a member of staff in a centre not too long ago and was told those employed were the best people for the job because they had been doing the work voluntarily and were known on the basis of their having been in and out of the centre. This is occurring wholesale.

We are not obtaining value for money in many of the centres. I met a girl in a centre on one occasion and asked her what she was doing and she replied the only job she did was to get a bingo hall ready for every Tuesday night. She stated she had nothing else to do. There is another centre in which the head honcho has three of his family on the payroll. He had the audacity to write to the Government stating the centre was not receiving adequate funding. This is occurring wholesale and there is no accountability. There are no inspections or audits of the centres; there is shag-all. No one checks the organisations and those running them believe in many cases that they are running their own little business and are entitled to do what they like. They say, "How dare you touch me, how dare you ask me what I am doing and how dare you ask about the hours I open. Please just get me funding as that is all I want to know about."

We have a responsibility to ensure taxpayers' money is spent wisely and that value for money is achieved. With regard to the organisations with which I am familiar, I can say honestly on oath that we are not getting value for money. We are throwing money down the drain that could be put to better use.

An inventory should be produced by the Department in each constituency to establish the services being provided. It should determine whether the services are essential or needed at all. The Department should ask whether the public would be better or worse off if the services were not in place and, ultimately, whether value for money is being achieved on foot of the money invested.

Every time one meets the director of a centre, he or she asks for funding and asks that representations be made to the Minister. If an organisation is entitled to funding, one should not have to make representations to anyone. A director should simply make a submission for the funding. It is a load of codology that politicians from all parties state they got this or that for an organisation. This should be stopped as it is a bloody nonsense. It is old-hat politics and make-believe stuff and the public do not believe in it any more. This sort of old cute hoor practice, so to speak, has been generated in politics——