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

I listened with interest to the Minister outlining the social welfare principle. It reminds me of the day I asked someone about somebody that we knew. He said: "The kind of guy he is, if you were down in a hole, he would pull you out, but if you went up a ladder, you were getting above yourself and he would pull you down." The Department of Social Protection seems to work on that principle. There is no question that if you are down in a hole, it will pull you out, but if you start climbing the ladder, it will pull you down pretty fast as well. There is that type of attitude there and we must move on from it. Despite what some people believe, people who are dependent on social welfare have very constrained lives generally. If you are totally dependent on social welfare, you live under a lot of rules and it is fairly constrained income.

I have a question on disability. I am trying to focus today on high-level questions because it is important that we start thinking deeply about the architecture of the system we have. The Minister is familiar with the partial capacity scheme. That introduced a new idea; that we differentiate between people with a profound disability, a severe disability, a moderate disability and a mild disability. The idea was that we would be a bit more generous to those at the profound end of the scale. In that case, it relates to invalidity pension and disability allowance, and a person can go to work and keep the payment. One of the big challenges we face is that the cost of disability is never taken into account. For people with profound or severe disabilities, or what the Department would term moderate disabilities, there is an increasing scale of costs as we go up the ladder. I know there were tentative ideas in the Department at one stage about creating a tiered scale of disability and invalidity payments that would pay more to people in the profound band and slightly less to those in the subsequent bands, and that those in the mild band would get the basic income that is currently available. A person would get more for a moderate disability, more again for a severe disability and more again for a profound disability.

This would be a very humane response to disability. It would stop the issue that worries the Department whereby if it increases the disability rate much above the unemployment payments, there might be migration. They would not get that extra bit over and above what is available now unless they had a moderate, severe or profound disability. Is there high-level policy debate in the Department looking at this issue and thinking about it?

This morning I received an email from somebody who makes a valid point. It was from somebody who has a child with multiple disabilities. This case involves a husband who is working and a wife who is a full-time carer getting carer's allowance. At present there are enormous energy costs involved with all the equipment the child is on constantly. The family is over the threshold. This means no matter how severe the disability is and how much it costs to care for the child, the family receives the standard rate of payment. The family has too high an income to receive an essential payment for increased energy costs. I do not know how much the husband earns at present but let us say it is €50,000 or €60,000. For people who must pay a mortgage such an income means they are still in fairly constrained circumstances. We need to look at the situation of the cost of disability on a graded basis. Are there high-level talks about reform of this system rather than just tinkering at the edges?