Ms Geraldine Fitzpatrick:

We forwarded the basis of our costings for both of these after the last committee meeting. The motorised transport grant has no age limit while the mobility allowance has an age limit. I gave a caveat when promising these figures for the committee that we would do the best we could with the available information. The census profile in 2011 gave a total of 542,277 people aged 15 and over with a disability, and of these, 112,502 were at work - just over 20%. Allowing for 50% eligibility, which is the average industrial wage cut off, with a motorised transport grant of €5,000 per annum every three years, we worked out a cost of €200 million over three years.

For the mobility allowance, we used the national disability survey and according to that, upwards of 59,000 people over 65 years of age had a lot of difficulty in walking for 50 minutes or could not do it at all. All of those people could be eligible for mobility allowance. We figured that while those failing the means test could reduce the number of people over 65, should the definition of disability be expanded to include those with a disability other than a mobility difficulty, the number of eligible people could increase further. That was how we arrived at the cost of €100 million.