Ms Clare Duffy:

The commission went into this in great detail. How do we identify long-term carers? How do we define long-term carers? We need to start with that definition. It went into great detail about identifying these long-term carers. There is no single repository in Ireland that will tell us how many carers there are. There are different sorts of information, which the Chair has alluded to. People get the means-tested carer's support grant, which is not the perfect database. The most perfect database is probably the people who receive the annual carer's support grant because it is not means tested. We have just under 120,000 full-time family carers in that. The pensions report also looked at people who claim care-related tax reliefs or tax credits. That is imperfect too because there is no requirement for those recipients to actually provide full-term care.

The model which we have suggested, which has been reflected in the recommendations, is a model that is used in the UK, where there are statutory carer registers. How the UK supports carers is different from how we do it. The UK does it through local authorities and general practitioners hold carer registers. We have to think about that. The recommendation from the Pensions Commission was that the Government would work with stakeholders, which I assumed to be organisations such as ours, and that together, we would develop the carers register. It is an immense challenge, not least when people come off the register, if the person they are caring for passes away. We expect them to declare that and come off the register. There is much consideration. We are almost at the point where we have no choice but to grasp the nettle and to try to establish this. As I said, we do not have a single repository that identifies any type of carer, least of which are long-term carers who have been caring for more than 20 years. The recommendation is that it would be done alongside us, as stakeholders in the sector.