maternity benefit mix up

Can somebody please help me.

I will be going on maternity leave in Oct of this year. I worked all of last year and I will be working up until I go on my leave hopefully all going well. I'm a bit of a nervous wreck when it comes to money matters. I like to know in plenty of time if everthing is going to go according to play.

Today I decided to ring the Maternity Grant Office and got on to a fella who seemed a bit confused. He said I would have needed to have paid or credited contributions in the relevent tax year to qualify. According to both welfare.ie and Citizen's Advice web site I would only need to have had worked 39 weeks in the 12 months up to the 1st day of my leave. Has anybody had experiance in this much?

Thanks in advance.

From the welfare website, it appears that the information you were given may have been incorrect - the "paid or credited contributions in the relevant tax year" requirement is an alternative to the "39 weeks paid contributions in the 12 months prior to maternity leave" requirement.

(I'm assuming you're an employee rather than self-employed, where the qualifying conditions are slightly different).

Why not email the Maternity Benefit section just to be sure? There's a secure email enquiry form at the end of this webpage.

http://www.welfare.ie/EN/Schemes/BirthChildrenAndFamilies/MaternityBenefit/Pages/mb.aspx