Denis Naughten (Roscommon-Galway, Independent) | Oireachtas source

We now move on to the next programme, which is illness, disability and carers. With the discretion of the committee, I will come in before other members because I have to go into the Dáil in a few minutes to speak about people with disabilities.

I wish to raise two issues with the Minister. The first is one I raised during the passage of the social protection legislation before Christmas and relates to the half-rate carer's allowance, specifically people who are in receipt of the State contributory pension and who receive the half-rate carer's allowance.

They are denied access to the fuel allowance scheme.

There is an anomaly within the social welfare code that discriminates against that cohort of people. If that person was in receipt of a non-contributory State pension, along with the half-rate carer's allowance, he or she would receive the fuel allowance. Even though these people's only income is from the State, since it happens to be a State contributory pension, they are denied access to the fuel allowance because the half-rate carer's allowance is, bizarrely, considered additional income. The Minister gave a commitment in December that she would look at this anomaly. Will she provide an update to the committee on that?

I flagged the issue of long Covid with the Minister's officials in advance. We are talking about the enhanced illness benefit payment for people who are diagnosed with Covid. The Oireachtas Library & Research Service produced a paper, which I commissioned, that has indicated there are 114,500 people in Ireland today with long Covid and rising. This has a huge potential cost to the Minister's Department with regard to illness benefit and disability allowance claims, as well as an impact on workforce participation.

Long Covid has a disproportionate impact on women and people in their middle age. We know, historically, that it is much harder to integrate people from those cohorts back in to the workforce after prolonged periods of absence from employment. Based on figures the Minister's Department provided to me through a reply to parliamentary question, in September 2021, 767 people who had Covid for in excess of ten weeks, that is, people who had Covid symptoms for a considerable period of time, were in receipt of the enhanced illness benefit payment for an extended period.

Those figures have gone up, in the five months from September until now, to 4,314 receiving that payment on a long-term basis. In the space of five months, the people who have been receiving the enhanced illness benefit payment for an extended period has gone up 562%. That is before we have seen the impact of the Omicron variant, which will have a further significant impact on those claim numbers. We face an avalanche of claims due to long Covid, even based on the Minister's statistics.

What measures are being taken by the Department to try to manage this to work with that cohort or people and assist them by providing supports and it is hoped, getting them back into work, either on a part-time or full-time basis, as quickly as possible? If the Minister could address those two issues, I would appreciate it.