Regina Doherty (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I appreciate the position the Minister is in. This is not about him per se. However, the two outstanding years that had nothing to do with Covid, 2018 and 2019, come to the sum total of €200,000. I would be very grateful because the Minister would find out about this far quicker than Senator Seery Kearney and I would.

I had the privilege of being Minister for Employment Affairs and Social Protection at the time we established the EWSS. Since then, probably for approximately two years afterwards, I spent an awful lot of my time trying to fight and help people to get access to the 80% of their salary to which they were entitled under the EWSS.

Yet, the Minister is telling me that with two employees, because that is all it has on its books, in 2021, St. John Ambulance Ireland got €286,800 under the EWSS and in 2020, it got €240,773. It does not add up. For the record of the House, I will instigate that the Minister for Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Reform ask for a review with the Revenue Commissioners today to find out how such enormous amounts of money were given to an organisation that had two full-time employees during Covid-19 when the rest of the country had to struggle.