Minister for Social Protection Heather Humphries has confirmed to Independent TD Carol Nolan that her Department has absolutely no data whatsoever regarding the number of social welfare payments that have been stopped due to an International Protection Applicant travelling out of the State.
“Where my department is made aware of an International Protection Applicant in receipt of a payment, travelling out of the State, their payment is stopped where applicable,” the Minister said. She added “my department does not collate specific statistics on the number of payments stopped, due to an International Protection Applicant travelling out of the State, therefore these figures are not available”.
However, Deputy Nolan said that Minister Helen McEntee in a separate parliamentary reply had confirmed that “it is not the practice” of her Department to notify the Department of Social Protection when a request for ministerial consent to leave the State is being accommodated:
It is currently the case, as laid out in Section 16 of the International Protection Act 2015, that international protection applicants shall not leave, or attempt to leave, the State without the consent of the Minister for Justice.
Where that permission is granted the Department of Justice can notify the Department of Social Protection to ensure that payments are continued or stopped, where applicable.
“I find it almost unbelievable that such a lax approach is adopted by both Departments,” said Deputy Nolan. “It appears zero data is being collected on the number of payments stopped, and that one Department is not talking to another.”
“We know from the Governments own assessments that we are likely to see tens of thousands of international protection applicants coming here in the coming years.”
“What I am saying quite clearly is that in such a context we absolutely must ensure that our welfare system is not open to potential exploitation.”
“I would also ask how we can achieve this when the Minister for Justice and her Department do not seem to care very much about notifying the Department of Social Protection about IPAS applicants who leave the state and when we have a Department of Social Protection who cannot even tell us if 1 or 1000 applicants have had their payments stopped due to failure to comply the rules or for deliberate breaching of the rules,.
“Without such data we are left to operate with key information deficits that do nothing to assist in developing the kind of robust and evidenced based approach that we urgently need, ” concluded Deputy Nolan.