Payment through bank

Stevolende

EDIT from something I heard on tv yesterday I've been wondering if there is a plan to return welfare payments to being through bank accounts. I thought this was something that had been intentionally fazed out over the last couple of years, so I was surprised to hear something that sounded like they were planning on reintroducing it

I'm just trying to make sense of what I saw on the news yesterday. I ws in the FAS office which happened to have some RTE news footage of the Dail live on. While I watched one of the TDs brought up a forthcoming situation with payments from what I took to be the Social Welfare. He was asking why it would be policy to ignore the existence of Post Offices when it came to payments when not everybody had bank accounts and banks weren't in everybody's good books at the moment. Also if there was a network of Post Offices in rural areas etc that were losing business already why this vital function of them wasn't preserved.
Sorry I'm not quoting verbatim, just trying to remember exactly what he did say.

The topic was brought up to Richard Boyd Barrett who was being interviewed from the news studio and he was talking about the introduction of some simple level of bank account being necessary for payment.

So what has had me puzzled is - is there a plan to return general payment of Social Welfare to bank accounts? I know that is the way people get payed if they are on courses etc but I thought they had just fazed out the general payment by that means for various reasons.

So in short is there a plan afoot to return welfare payment to an ETF type thing through bank accounts?
Anybody know anything about this?

Stevolende

I thought it might be something that other people here might have heard something about. i was just very surprised to hear something that sounded like they were doing a U turn on a policy I could see the reason behind their introduction of.

Sounded like all payment was going to become electronic at some point in the near future. Subsequently it saved the SP money and paperwork to have it going straight into bank accounts than to use post offices.

Just still wondering if anybody had heard anything about it.

& question in first post should have been titled 'is payment through bank returning?'

mp22

Appears to be political speak at present.

Closed