The social welfare system is primarily a contingency-based system, with entitlement based on defined contingencies, such as sickness, unemployment, old age or widowhood. Primary social welfare legislation provides that only one social welfare payment is payable at any one time. While it can happen that a person may experience more than one contingency at the same time — for example, an unemployed person may become sick — a general principle applies whereby even if a person experiences more than one of the contingencies at any one time, he or she only receives one of those payments. This principle is common to social security systems across the world.
However, the legislation also provides that regulations may be made to enable more than one of the payments to be paid concurrently and, where applied, it is usually in the context of short-term benefits. For instance, persons in receipt of widows/widowers pension can, at the same time, receive short-term social insurance benefits such as illness benefit or unemployment benefit, at half rate.
In terms of the examination of the current process of single payments by any group or task force the most recent review of these schemes in contained in The report of the Special Group on Public Service Numbers and Expenditure Programmes (June 2009) which recommends changes to the eligibility conditions of social welfare schemes to eliminate second welfare payments, so that claimants already in receipt of a primary weekly social welfare payment should not qualify for payment under another scheme. The Group also recommends that the Department of Social Protection includes explicitly the role of the Widows’/Widowers’ Pension if it undertakes a future review of working-age social transfers in this context. No legal challenge has been undertaken to date in this regard.