Cathal Crowe (Clare, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

One of the private home care providers in the country gave me a pretty decent briefing, and we get a lot of these. Sometimes one has to let these briefings in one ear and out the other but I was told clearly that there is a significant cohort of people willing to take up employment. These people might respond to an advertisement online or in the local press that is seeking for care assistants and offering to help them to get trained up but people quickly discover there is a large number of barriers. Those barriers should be broken down. For a lot of these people it might have been a choice to be a stay-at-home parent for a number of years. Perhaps if the rules were changed and if they were allowed to go out during school hours and provide home care within their communities for that four or five hours, be freed up in the evening and not have their income overly taxed, it would be a great incentive to get this growing at grassroots level in an organic way. I hope those aspects can be considered in parallel with the health aspects because income, taxation and threshold barriers are preventing more people joining. They cannot recruit people.