Trevor Ó Clochartaigh (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Cuirim fáilte roimh an Aire. Tá mé an-bhuíoch dó as ucht an am a thógáil, cé go bhfuil sé an-ghnóthach ag an aimsir seo. I am returning to an issue I raised previously with the Minister's predecessor regarding the social welfare offices that were closed in rural areas and in the Connemara area in particular. As the Minister, Deputy Leo Varadkar is aware, when Deputy Joan Burton was Minister, there was a movement of community welfare officers, CWOs, from the HSE to the Department of Social Protection in 2011 and 2012, with the Department taking over more than 900 clinics that the CWOs previously undertook. The Minister at the time maintained that the service had been enhanced, with phone lines being preferable to clinics and CWOs visiting people's homes to meet them where needed. It was said that the restructuring of the services was to be done in a way that would not compromise the accessibility of the CWO and the person who succeeded them, as the job specification and the name have changed.

We had a particular concern in Connemara with the closure of the service in Carraroe and the services in Oughterard and Spiddal being rationalised and moved to Galway city. The Minister at the time told us it was to provide for a streamlined and consistent service to the customer. The language used was interesting in that it proposed a "customer" rather than a client, and that anybody using the services of a CWO or social welfare office is regarded as a customer as opposed to a client.We were informed that where community welfare services had been restructured, alternative arrangements had been put in place to ensure "customers" - that word again - would be provided with ongoing access to the supports provided by the service and that, in general, this would mean that the frequency of available public clinics would be increased. At the time, I and others raised issues about this because in rural areas where a service was being removed or moved to an urban centre, transport connections such as bus services were not available. The latter remains the case. For example, there is no bus service to Clifden, the nearest centre for people living in Carna, County Galway. Anyone wishing to go to the city would have to get a bus first thing in the morning, stay in the city all day and return at night. This is still the case. From places such as Carna, the bus service runs only a couple of days a week.

People have told me they have been asked to attend at the centre in Galway on several occasions for three and four days in the same week in some cases in order to finalise their claims for supports from the Department of Social Protection. It has been said that in instances where people are not in a position to travel due to a lack of resources or transport, officials from the Department would call out to them to ensure that they were provided with a service. Somebody at a briefing on the family resource centres in the audio-visual room of these Houses last week said this does not happen when a request is made.

My question relates to the closure of these offices, particularly in the context of exceptional needs payments that would have been paid over the three previous years. How much of a saving has the regional office made in exceptional needs payments to the people of Connemara since those offices were shut down. What is the level of overall savings made by the Department through the closure of those offices? Tá mé an-bhuíoch don Aire faoi theacht isteach agus tá mé ag súil go mór leis an bhfreagra a bheidh aige dom.