Social Welfare Schemes Dail Éireann — 2025-05-01 ============================================================ James O'Connor (FF), Cork East The programme for Government states that we must ensure the social protection system is work friendly and that welfare traps which inhibit people from taking up work are removed. At present, a person on jobseeker's allowance who receives an offer of part-time work may actually end up worse off financially if their hours are spread across the whole working week rather than being concentrated over three days or less. This could easily be addressed with some focus, and I appreciate the comments the Minister has made. I hope we can work on it together. I just wanted to raise the issue because I thought it was important. I appreciate the Department's response that this will be worked on in the coming weeks and months. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2025-05-01/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:53:45+00:00 Sitting date: 2025-05-01