TEN THOUSAND children who live abroad are in receipt of child benefit in this State. Under EU law, children who live in another EU country qualify for child benefit if one of their parents is living and working in Ireland.
The secretary general of the Department of Social and Family Affairs, Bernadette Lacey, said 6,000 families where the children live abroad qualify for child benefit, with 80 per cent of them coming from Poland.
The child benefit payments cost the State €20 million annually.
She said the department was making three-monthly checks to ensure that a parent lived in Ireland and was either working or claiming benefit in Ireland.
Ms Lacey said Ireland had been a net recipient of child benefit from the UK, where many Irish parents had been resident in the past. She also told the Public Accounts Committee that social welfare staff were running out of office space to deal with the rapid increase in the number of unemployed people.
The doubling in the numbers on the Live Register since the end of 2007 had been “unprecedented” and resulted in long queues in local offices and delays in processing claims.
Some 70,000 claims were awaiting processing. A total of 250 additional staff had been allocated to the department in recent months, and an additional 190 had been assigned to local offices, along with 16 more social welfare inspectors and 20 new facilitators.
She said the increase in the number of staff in local offices had put pressure on their accommodation, and “we are reaching the point where we will not be able to put more staff into local offices”.
To overcome the difficulties claims were now being processed centrally in four offices, Finglas and Townsend Street in Dublin, Sligo and Carrick-on-Shannon.
Labour TD Róisín Shortall said it was an “awful sight” to see people queuing in the cold and rain outside social welfare offices. There was now a wait of two months in 17 social welfare offices.
“By any standard two months is completely unacceptable.”
Ms Lacey said she appreciated there had been “a lot of difficulties” but the numbers were going up “faster than anybody had expected”.
Public Accounts Committee chairman Bernard Allen said there did not seem to be enough flexibility within the Civil Service to deal with the “tsunami of unemployment”. Ms Lacey said they had acquired staff from other departments, but there were problems with transfer lists.
