Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail)

We had a fines Bill which allows for instalment payments. The court decides what a person can pay. There is always a problem with people on social welfare. One cannot go below the supplementary welfare rate which is the same as the jobseeker's allowance basic rate and the jobseeker's benefit basic rate. The fines Bill is the way to go. The Department recovers moneys owed to it. I get endless representations from Deputies and Senators asking for the Department to go easy in such cases. I have sympathy for those affected because none of us can live beneath a certain threshold. The best approach is to stop people receiving overpayments because going after them to retrieve them can be a painful experience. While overpayment can be hard to avoid if people do not give all the information, one still cannot get blood out of a turnip afterwards. Even if one had all the orders in the world, there is only so much money that can be taken off a social welfare recipient.

I believe the Fines Act was a great step forward. Before that, one person earning €100,000 a year and another earning €10,000 could both be fined €1,000. It was not the same penalty, however. The first person could easily pull out a cheque book, write the cheque and not think about the fine again. For the other person, however, it would have been a huge penalty. The Fines Act addressed this anomaly.

It must also be remembered the numbers brought to court for social welfare fraud are relatively small. Overpayments occur for many reasons. The most common is the older person whose social welfare payments continue to their next-of-kin but the older person had money in the bank which they did not declare. Some time after they died it can come out in the probate. These are the overpayments we get without fail. While people must declare as they have an obligation to do so, on the scale of wrongs that have been committed in our society I am not sure these are the greatest. There is also a burden already on those less well-off.