Peadar Tóibín
Question:80. Deputy Peadar Tóibín asked the Minister for Social Protection if she will reopen a full-time social protection office in Castlepollard, County Meath. [15407/23]
View answerTuesday, 28 March 2023
Questions (80)
Oral answers (10 contributions)
Castlepollard is a vibrant, strong rural town. It has a hinterland that stretches for miles. Like many other rural towns, it has been devastated in recent years by the closure of a number of key businesses and services within that town. It lost banks, it has lost shops, etc. The latest blow to Castlepollard has been the closure by Fine Gael of the full-time social welfare office in the region. It is nearly a year since the Minister closed that office. Will the Minister give some hope to the people in the region that this office will be opened again on a full-time basis?
I thank the Deputy for raising this. First, we did not close the branch office.
Branch offices are privately run small offices that, in the main, accept and validate applications for jobseeker and one-parent family payments and then pass them on to the Department's national processing team for processing and payment. They can also provide public service card registrations and act as outreach offices for other services, including employment and community welfare services on a part-time basis.
Castlepollard branch office closed on 8 April 2022 at the request of the then branch office manager who, unfortunately, had to retire due to ill health. Since then, an outreach service continues to be provided in the county council offices, Mullingar Road, Castlepollard every Tuesday and Wednesday each week.
My Department closely monitors all relevant data in regard to the service provision in this and all other localities. A total of 366 new claims, or approximately seven per week, across all schemes were registered in Castlepollard in the last year. This level of activity would not justify the opening of a full-time social welfare office but the situation will be kept under review.
In addition, we have maintained an outreach service there. There has been no reduction in service levels by the Department in relation to activation measures, community welfare support or inspector activities. Customer claims can also be taken and validated, as before, in the outreach centre.
People in the Castlepollard area are also fully supported by Mullingar Intreo Centre where customers are welcome to conduct their business by attending in person, emailing mullingar@welfare.ie or via the dedicated phone line. The Department's services are also available through digital and online channels at MyWelfare.ie.
As a result of these options, the closure of the branch office has not impacted speed of claim processing. All new claims, whether received in the outreach centre or via other channels, are processed now, as before the branch office closure, by the Department's national processing team in a timely manner.
The Minister is saying on one level that she did not close it and on another level that it is only operational two days a week because there is not enough business to go through it.
I told the Deputy the position. That is not true.
The Minister is responsible for the delivery of that service in towns such as Castlepollard.
The Minister goes on to say people can travel down the road to Mullingar. The Minister may not be aware that in many regional rural towns there are difficulties with public transport. There are definitely difficulties with private transport currently for many people on lower incomes given the price of fuel as well.
Let me tell the Minister that the closure of this service has had an enormous impact on spend. It was nearly a Freudian slip from the Minister in relation to the effect of spend in the town. When you have a full-time service such as this one, it brings people in and when they are in the town of Castlepollard, they go about their daily business.
Castlepollard Local Development group has made numerous efforts to reach out to the Minister and ask her to talk to it about the future of this office to see whether the group can provide a location for it. There is the former Bank of Ireland location there, which has been turned into beautiful new offices, which would make a wonderful location for this and which would have the effect of revitalising Castlepollard. I would urge the Minister to meet with the Castlepollard Local Development group.
First, and I would like the Deputy to listen to this, I did not close this office. It was being run by a branch manager on a contract. Unfortunately, he got sick, he had to retire and that is why the office closed.
My Department acted quickly to put alternative arrangements in place to serve the people of Castlepollard. We keep this under review on an ongoing basis but we have to target resources where the demand is. If the claim load increases and we need to expand the services, we will do that.
There is a misunderstanding here. No payments are collected in the social welfare office. They are collected in the post office. People continue to collect their payments and the footfall is still there from people collecting their payments. Indeed, when Covid restrictions passed, I was the one who made the decision that people would go back and collect their money in the post office. When they do that, they are more likely to spend their money locally.
I want to see people spending their money locally, just as the Deputy does. I worked closely with Mr. Ned O'Hara and the Irish Postmasters' Union to make sure that people went back into the post office.
The Minister should not mention post offices because her party has closed hundreds of them over the past number of years.
The Deputy is talking nonsense.
In fairness, the Government's approach to rural Ireland is not about keeping key services functioning in those towns so that people will come into them and then spend and shop elsewhere, but is, as I stated previously, like a landlord of old, to throw money up in the air and let the peasants tip around the ground and see can they pick up those pennies. That is a culture of dependency. What I am talking about is different. It is about building towns and villages in rural Ireland and regional Ireland that can grow and prosper on their own basis. That is what we need.
We in Aontú have collected hundreds of petitions in Castlepollard and the surrounding area in an effort to reopen it.
The Minister was the first to give out about the banks when they closed the cash machines in areas saying that they should not have done so without negotiation with the local people. Here the Minister is closing this service as a full-time service without negotiation with people. If the Minister even looks at the Castlepollard Local Development group, it has managed to bring back an automated teller machine, ATM, into the area. There is an opportunity to reopen this service in the former Bank of Ireland offices. I would urge the Minister to sit down with the group and make sure that there is a future for that town.
My record, in terms of the investment that has gone into rural Ireland through the Rural Regeneration Fund and, indeed, a plethora of other funds, is second to none.
We are supporting the Castlepollard regeneration project with a grant of €3.8million. The project will have additional match funding from Westmeath County Council. It will bring the total amount of investment in Castlepollard to €4.7 million. I can tell the Deputy that is no pennies; that is €4.7 million of investment. It will refurbish the Market House, bringing vitality and viability to Castlepollard town centre.
It is fair to say that, in terms of rural Ireland, my Department has not been found wanting. As I said to the Deputy previously, we keep all of these issues under review in terms of the workload and the demand for services in particular areas.
Question No. 81 taken with Written Answers.