Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

If Deputy Kerrane wants to go first, I am easy. I have a few very specific questions. I will get down to nuts and bolts because we know what happens on budget day: the Government announces figures. I wish to ask two questions about the carer's allowance. First, have the witnesses any calculation as to how many people would get the full-rate carer's allowance if the disregard were increased to €500 for a single person and €1,000 for a couple from the present €332 and €665, respectively? It would be very useful to get a figure in that regard. Second, I want that disregard in the capital assessment because, as all my colleagues on the committee know, I have an obsession with the way in which the capital assessment is done. It is totally bizarre right across the schemes. My view - and I will be straight with the carers and everybody else - is that if the capital assessment system is to be changed, it has to be changed across the board, for all schemes. Otherwise, we will get people trying to get from one scheme to another. It will not work. A thing like this has to be done evenly.

Only one thing puzzled me earlier. I liked Family Carers Ireland's proposal. I thought, "Very nice, the €50,000 is grand and is exempt." There is the €10,000 at €1 and the next €10,000 at €2, but I could not understand why Family Carers Ireland left the €4 rate in there. That is 20% interest. Are the witnesses from Family Carers Ireland telling me that at the bank you can get 20% interest? They would be surprised who gets caught on this one, for example, rural communities in which a young couple have built their own house. The parents have died and left the old farmhouse. It might not be in great nick but it would be worth €100,000 or €120,000 because any house in a country area is worth a lot of money now. There are people who have just saved money and people who have got awards. There are all sorts of ways people can have €100,000 or €120,000. It is not an awful lot of money in a lifetime. As was rightly pointed out, when a person are caring, that is not a profession. We should forget about calling it a profession. It is a vocation into which people enter, in most cases, voluntarily. In most cases the family circumstances determine that. Has there been any thought about this or was Family Carers Ireland afraid it would be a step too far? It mounts up incredibly fast. Once you go over whatever ceiling is set, whack, you hit this massive wall. It works very badly against those being cared for as well - for example, people on disability allowance - if parents die and leave the house between two or three kids and they get their share out of it. Suddenly, they are whacked completely in respect of it. I know this is kind of nitty-gritty but this is what really makes the difference for the people who come into our constituency clinics.

May I ask the St. Vincent de Paul about lone parents? All the surveys the Department has carried out highlight the fact that lone parents are the most disadvantaged group in society. That is well known in the Department and has been well known for a long time. For many people on HAP, the contributions they make as individuals amount to more than the local authority contributions. In other words, they have to make extra contributions or they cannot get the properties. Is the SVP finding that this is causing huge poverty among people? Do the witnesses understand what I am saying? If a person goes on the HAP scheme, in many cases, as well as paying the statutory contribution - in other words, the equivalent of the local authority rent - he or she will have to and is allowed to make an extra payment to the landlord in order to get the property. In most cases, certainly in Galway city, an individual will wind up paying that extra payment or he or she will not get a property and will be on the street. That seems to me to be causing an awful lot of poverty among people in general, but particularly people such as those in one-parent families. Is the SVP coming across that?

I have another question for the SVP. As well as the rates, one issue that comes across to me is that the old discretionary emergency payment is gone and that everything now is systemised into something and a means assessment is done. However, people could be very short of money for reasons other than the money coming into the house. They could have a partner who has a gambling addiction, a drink addiction or any other addiction. There could be all sorts of reasons a person runs out of cash. In the old days the community welfare officer knew this on a personal basis and could bail the person out. That seems all to be gone and we do not seem to have any safety net for the crisis situations. Is the SVP coming across more and more people who are literally without money? It is not as simple a thing as money not coming in. In some cases the person who needs the money is not getting it.

I have just one final point. I am very interested in the cost-of-living basis for assessing the adequacy of the average wage. I am very much against index-linking because that keeps people at the same level of poverty they are at all the time. There has to be a way of indexing it against other parameters that make sure that if we are way behind with our social welfare rates, we have our target to catch up with, even if it is not done in one year.