Social Welfare (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2024: Committee and Remaining Stages
Seanad Éireann — 2024-07-09
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Alice-Mary Higgins (IND), National University of Ireland

The fundamental issue is how it is done and how people get treated. I sat on the social protection committee, which did a full review of JobPath and many of these measures. People were treated poorly and had poor quality experiences as a result.
I want to highlight something else, which I will hopefully get a chance, although this Bill is being guillotined, to discuss further but the fact is that this is not a scheme to give people €450 a week. Many people will be on much lower incomes on this scheme. Due to it being so individualised and separated out, there is also no recognition within this payment for qualified children, adults or household realities. This matters because those are factors that matter when we think about what is the appropriate employment and opportunity for somebody. It is that they are able to look to factors like that and have them considered. That is an issue in this Bill and is one of the reasons many people find themselves severely less well-off and many households, in particular, will be less well-off by the measures in this Bill.
My colleague has spoken about jobseeker's transitional payment and the experience of people and I will let her speak to that but people were inappropriately routed to inappropriate employments. For example, when I worked at one point with young unemployed people in County Wexford, they found themselves routed to completely inappropriate jobs. There is also an issue with lone parents as they are all getting routed to low-paid work and to childcare, as an assumption, as the only appropriate thing even when it was not a good match for their skills.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2024-07-09/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:53:11+00:00
Sitting date: 2024-07-09