Gerard P. Craughwell criticises state after John O'Mara case

Thank you very much. Minister, you're welcome to the House. I think this is the first time I've addressed you in your current role, so congratulations on your position. Before I get into what I've written here, one of the questions that crosses my mind, Minister, when I come across a case like John O'Mara's case, why does our state force a family to go the whole way to a Supreme Court judgment in order to fix something that was morally wrong in the first instance? I know that's not your fault, and I know it's not the fault of your officials that are there. I know it's the way the system works. The state has deep pockets, and the state can keep a family forever in the courts if they want to do that, and it is grossly unfair. And to think that that man had to go through so much, having lost his partner, just to look after his children. And it brings to mind another issue, and that is the issue that there's only one instance that I'm aware of where you can have two social welfare payments. You can have disablement, and you can have disability together, as far as I'm aware. But I'm not aware of any other circumstance where you can have two payments. And consider this. Consider a young widow or widower who loses a partner early in life, and is granted the widow or widower's pension. They have a job as well. They come to retirement age, and they qualify for their contributory old age pension. The moment they do, they lose their partner's pension. Now, if I've been paying social welfare all my life, and I die, I paid for what I'm getting. It's not a gift from the state. I paid for it. And my wife is entitled to her widow's pension. And she is entitled to whatever she paid for as well. And I think that that's another anomaly that will one day have to find itself in the Supreme Court, whereby I'm aware of a relation of my own, who struggled hard all her life to educate her kids after her husband died. And the moment she turned 66, bang, the contributory, or the widow's pension was gone, which left her in hardship. And you know, I mean, she suddenly found her income completely collapsed. So I think that's something that we have to look at. And I really do. And as Senator Robertson said it there, John O'Mara, what a man. And the wonderful partner he had, that she would have made sure that she had her payments up to date and everything else. So the laws that stood under Section 124 of the Social Welfare Consolidation Act 2005 required a brief partner to be a legal widow, widower, or surviving civil partner. Now I see another Supreme Court case coming on in the legislation that you're bringing forward to us today. And that is in the section where you say, this section also sets out where a spouse or civil partner whose relationship has broken down for more than two years shall not be considered a bereaved partner for the purposes of the act. We live in troubled times. Relationships break down. And there are many examples where we can see a relationship is broken down. And the partners do their best to try and make a family life for their family. They're living apart. They're trying to work through whatever differences they have. At some stage they come to the decision, you know what, we should try and get back together and we should try and make it work. And they might have been three years apart. And they might be going through marriage counseling or relationship counseling in order to get back into a relationship. And a month before they're due to move in together, one or other dies. They don't qualify under this. So they will find themselves in a situation where they would have been in a relationship. That would relationship would have probably cemented itself again, would have re-established itself again. And whatever children there were there would have benefited from the joint income or whatever income arrangements the relationship had. But under this act, and I know it's possibly a moot point today, but people do die. And people do have broken relationships. And broken relationships do get repaired and people do come back together again. And are we going to force some unfortunate woman or some unfortunate man into the courts to prove that they were in the process of rebuilding the relationship? And I'm fully aware in saying that, Minister, that there is a possibility that this would be exploited. Sorry, Minister. I'll suspend the House for the vote. Is that agreed? There are anomalies in the system. A lot of what I had written here you have already delivered in your own speech. So I'm not going to go back into the historical background of John's case. But there are anomalies in the system. And we are very privileged in this country in the civil servants we have working in departments. And I firmly believe there is no civil servant who goes out of their way to block people or block payments. Legislation is their rule book. They have to live by that. But then we go to the state's claims agency, who are the people who actually manage something that goes wrong. And they take off the gloves and they go bare knuckle fighting, so they do, with people who are in the most horrendous state of their lives. We've got to find a way where cases like this case, when they come, that a minister is immediately informed. And when the minister is informed, the first question should be, how can we resolve this to the benefit of the citizen of the state, rather than how can we build a wall so high that the average citizen will never be able to climb it? And you know, I get lots of stick like you do, and people say lots of things about governments and useless governments. And today it's Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. Tomorrow it'll be somebody else's in government. It doesn't matter. At the end of the day, nobody comes in here deliberately setting out to block citizens of this country. Nobody works in any civil service office in this country deliberately setting out to block people. But we operate under a rule book. And the rule book in the state's claim agency is defend to the death. And that's what they did against this family. They held them to the very last. And at the very end, when the Supreme Court, when the Supreme Court made its judgment, it provided political cover for the minister, even if the minister didn't know about it. Because the Ministers and Secondaries Act, under the Ministers and Secondaries Act, if a civil servant writes something in your name, then it's you wrote it. It doesn't matter whether you wrote it or not. That's the nature of the word. I remember once being told by a senior official that he used his name, Os Gaeilge, for official correspondence. And I said, why? He said, you never know when you have to write to a next door neighbor. And so the bottom line on it is we can hide behind the rule book, but we really need to change. The issue I was making about the widow's pension, you hit 66 years of age and suddenly you can't have the widow's pension, which the deceased person paid for. It's not a gift from the state. It is something that was bought and paid for. And that is the whole purpose behind the social welfare system. There are many anomalies within social welfare that I could discuss here, but I'm not going to. But the one thing I do know is that in any case, certainly some years ago, when we took the county councillors class K case, we had to go the whole way to the courts. And when we arrived at the courts, we'll settle this. And class S came in for county councillors. So at the end of the day, what I would ask, Minister, is that I know government is busy. I know the cabinet is busy. I would ask that we actually maybe try and get a sub committee of cabinet to look at the way we deal with citizens of the state who find themselves in conflict. I have no difficulty with the state throwing everything it possibly can at somebody who has maliciously taken a case against the state. But where we're talking about people in crisis, where we're talking about, you know, we've had cases where people on their deathbed had officials from government dealing with them to solve claims in various cancer cases down through the years. We should never get to that state. So I haven't bothered reading my speech here because I actually support what you're doing. I think what you've done is a really noble thing to do. Sure, when we come to committee stage, there will probably be amendments and we may have an argument or two about that. But I think you've acted quickly. You've come in here and you've acted quickly. And that's to be commended. And I commend you for that. And I commend your officials for putting together legislation that will allow the unfortunate people who find themselves in a situation where a partner has passed away, that they're not going to be destitute. But I would ask you to look at this rule of two years. Because if there is a situation where a couple have broken up, but if there can be empirical evidence or verifiable evidence that the couple were trying to rekindle the relationship, to try and get back together again, then we should be looking after the deceased person's family as best we can. And rather than asking somebody to go to the Supreme Court on it, I would ask that maybe we look at how we might do that at the committee stage. And once again, I want to thank you for your time and I want to thank your officials for their work, because they're the people who put this together. Thank you. Thank you.