Marie Moloney (Labour) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State for his reply. He has taken the words out of my mouth as his last point was one I was going to put to him. People have made an effort to pay this tax. They do not like it but they have agreed to it and they are paying it. We should make it as simple as possible for members of the general public to pay their property tax. I could contradict much of what the Minister of State said but I appreciate the difficulty in dealing with the volume of queries. The call waiting times are far from one minute, two minutes and eight minutes. I am not going to argue with the Minister of State about this but I ask him, through his good offices, or the Minister to extend the deadline from tonight to enable people, having regard to the difficulty they have had in getting through to the helpline, to get their affairs sorted.

The Minister of State referred to wrong payments. It was not the case that an applicant put in the wrong payment but rather that the wrong amount was stated in the letter issued in October. That issue is probably the source of the biggest number of queries people are trying to get sorted. The Minister of State might be in a position to confirm that the deadline would be extended for a another couple of weeks.