Ms Clare Duffy:

I get all the nice questions and the difficult ones to answer. Deputy Kerrane is absolutely right that three or four years ago there was a huge issue whereby people were going to be charged depending on the weight of their bins and there was uproar. Joe Duffy fuelled a lot of that uproar. People who care for someone who is incontinent will have much heavier bins. When the Chair was Minister with responsibility for the environment he managed to secure €7 million to put aside for an annual allowance of €75 credit on the waste collection bin for households where incontinence care was provided. Despite not months but years of trying we could not make it work. The issue was identifying households where incontinence care was provided. We could identify those households in the public system through public health nurses who provided incontinence pads but that left out all of the people who bought pads privately. The public health nurses and the HSE rightly did not want to share data on who was receiving incontinence pads from them. In the midst of all of this we had GDPR. I do not know where the €7 million is now but every effort was made to address the issue. The other significant thing that happened was a rowback on pay by weight and households now have much more choice as to how they pay for their bins.

The Deputy's question on the total contributions approach and whether we have seen an improvement appears to be a simple question but it is complicated. The Deputy is absolutely right that the main beneficiaries of the total contributions approach are meant to be family carers. It has improved many of the legacy pension issues that existed for carers who take shorter periods of time out of the workforce to provide care. If I take two or three years out of the workforce to care from my mother, the total contributions approach will very neatly plug that hole in my record. If I take eight or nine years, it will still plug that hole. Where the difficulty arises is for lifetime carers who have cared for more than 20 years. It puts them beyond the protection of the homemaker's scheme or the home caring periods allowed under the total contributions approach and they are not protected. This is why in our written submission and oral presentation to the Commission on Pensions we called for a dedicated pension for lifetime family carers who care for long periods.

As part of that submission we are saying, for people who take shorter periods out of the workforce a total contributions approach or TCA is quite a good solution.