Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I take the Senator's point about customers and clients. To me, a customer is somebody who goes into a business and probably pays money whereas this situation is the reverse. Health care always disliked the move away from the term "patient" to those of "client" or "customer". It is the term the Department uses and it is not trying to disparage those who rely on our services but to ingrain the idea of a business model in the operations of the Department. Perhaps it is not the right language.

I visited the Intreo centre in Galway city a couple of weeks ago. It is a very impressive building and a very modern centre. I met some of the community welfare officers, including the lady who goes out to the clinic in Kilronan on Inis Mór, in the Aran Islands, and chatted with them about this issue. They are very much of the view that they can provide the service in Galway city over the phone or by making house calls if needs be. For that reason, there are no proposals to open new offices anywhere in the country.

The overall cost of ENPs has gone down across the country for two reasons: first, fewer people have recourse to these payments because fewer are unemployed and incomes are rising again; and, second, payments were standardised across the country. On the latter point, in the past, because these payments came from the old health board system, people in different parts of the country were receiving different amounts in respect of the same fridges, microwaves or whatever they needed. There were significant savings when ENPs were standardised.