Courtney McGrailThe Society of St Vincent de Paul (SVP) is now spending more than the Department of Social Protection on helping people tackle the cost of “exceptional needs”.
Since 2008, the department’s expenditure on exceptional needs has dropped from over €80 million to just €29 million this year. The number of payments each year has also dropped, with almost 133,000 payments in 2013 falling to just over 107,000 last year.
Over the same period, in contrast, the SVP has annually provided almost €40 million in direct assistance to families needing the kind of support previously provided through the Exceptional Needs Payment (ENP) scheme.
Low incomes
SVP social policy officer Caroline Fahey, while praising the scheme as “a vital support designed to help people on low incomes to meet essential, once-off expenditure which they cannot meet out of their weekly income”, questioned the scale of cuts the scheme has evidently experienced.
“Part of the drop is due to the decision not to support payments for Communion and Confirmation expenses,” she told The Irish Catholic, and some would have been down to the decision to no longer fund “new accommodation kits” for people moving into private rented accommodation, but these could hardly explain how dramatically expenditure had dropped in the demand-led scheme, she said.