Róisín Shortall (Dublin North West, Labour)
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Question 122: To ask the Minister for Social and Family Affairs the rationale behind only allowing a half-rate illness benefit payment in the case of an employee who takes sick leave when a similar employee who is not a widow may qualify for a full payment. [19573/09]

Mary Hanafin (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)
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The social welfare system is primarily a contingency-based system, with entitlement based on defined contingencies, such as sickness, unemployment, old age or widowhood. Primary social welfare legislation provides that only one social welfare payment is payable at any one time. While it can happen that a person may experience more than one contingency at the same time - for example, an unemployed person may become sick - a general principle applies whereby even if a person experiences more than one of the contingencies at any one time, he or she only receives one of those payments. This principle is common to social security systems across the world.

However, the legislation also provides that regulations may be made to enable more than one of the payments to be paid concurrently and, where applied, it is usually in the context of short-term benefits. For instance, persons in receipt of widows/widowers pension can, at the same time, receive short-term social insurance benefits such as illness benefit or unemployment benefit, at half rate.

The current overlapping payment arrangements were introduced in whole or in part in the early nineteen fifties. At that time, there were only ten individual social welfare schemes. As the Deputy is aware, the system has been gradually developed over the intervening years with the result that there is now a significantly greater number of separate schemes in place. As a result, the number of possible combinations of concurrent contingencies has increased greatly and it is realistic and prudent to maintain the underlying principle of entitlement to one payment only at any one time. To do otherwise could potentially involve very significant additional expenditure involving not only widows and widowers but also other categories of welfare recipient.