The Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection has defended its inspections at airports to check if recipients of the Pandemic Unemployment Payment were leaving the country, which it claimed had generated €10m in savings to the Exchequer.
There was controversy over the summer when it emerged that inspectors were cutting off the payment based on questioning passengers at airports and that the vast majority of the flights targeted for inspections involved routes to Romania or Moldova.
Responding to parliamentary questions from Social Democrats co-leader Catherine Murphy, Minister Heather Humphreys noted that all social welfare schemes were subject to "control and compliance" checks to ensure that Exchequer resources provided for the schemes are protected.
She stressed that PUP recipients were required to be resident in Ireland - and that payments were stopped where recipients no longer had an entitlement because they were leaving the State.
No criminal prosecutions have been initiated by the Department directly arising from the checks at the airport - though a number of criminal prosecutions are under way in relation to the PUP.
The minister said the Social Welfare Consolidation Act 2005 gave social welfare inspectors the powers to attend at ports and airports - and to make enquires for the purposes of the control and compliance of social welfare schemes.
She acknowledged that in recent months, against the backdrop of the Covid-19 pandemic, inspectors made enquires of persons who were leaving the state but stressed: "The nature of these enquiries was very limited and the information collected was also limited to that which was necessary to determine if the person was in receipt of a payment that they were not entitled to receive if they were leaving the State."
The minister continued: "Given the employment effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, the high proportion of people in receipt of a jobseeker/PUP payments and the general travel advice issued by governments around the world, the department believes that it was entirely reasonable during that short period of time, that an inspector would form the view, in accordance with the provisions of the 2005 Act, that passengers embarking on a flight could include persons who were in receipt of social welfare payments."
She said it was important to note that the nature of the enquiries was in relation to payments that 825,000 people (33% of all working age adults or more than 50% of all private sector workers) were then receiving.
Minister Humphreys confirmed that the last compliance check conducted by the department at Dublin Airport was on 16th July, while the last inspection at ports was on 28th July.
She said this reflected factors including the significant drop in the numbers receiving the PUP, the "operational experience" of the Department in carrying out this work, and the department's "evolving" approach in light of the government's advice around travel abroad.
The minister also noted that inspectors have carried out control checks at airports and ports since 2012, saying the inspection work being done in recent months was therefore part of the ongoing control work that the department is engaged in.
She said it was done in the context of the pandemic where people were leaving the State in large numbers, many with open PUP claims.
The minister's responses to Ms Murphy's queries failed to address whether she or her predecessor Regina Doherty had had a role in the authorisation of the social protection checks at airports, and what criteria were used to identify which flights were to be checked by departmental officials.
