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

I listened with great care to what the witnesses said. I think we all know the destination to which we want to get. The question for us as politicians working in the system we work in is how to get to that destination. There are two very simple wins we should ask for straight out, one of which being that carer's allowance should not be taxable. The taxation system on social welfare payments is quite complex. Pensions are taxable but assistance and disability allowance and so on are not. The invalidity pension is taxable. It is full of anomalies but a very simple remedy here is to put carer's allowance in the non-taxable bracket.

The second win is to deal with the fuel allowance anomaly, which has been raised by the Chair many times. The issue then arises in dealing with the system and the fact there are competing demands and that we will be told there are all sorts of unintended consequences in terms of how we actually progress. Can we make the whole leap to where I think we all would like to go in one jump or do we have to take it in steps? This is something we will have to reflect on again after this meeting.

One thing that comes across very clearly, particularly where people have children with a disability, is that it involves a very long period in their lives. It is indefinite, effectively. On the law of averages, often with older people, it is shorter-term care and could be quite finite. Things were looked at in the past, such as whether there should be gradation on the level of care to be given or in other words, the level of disability. There are challenges if we go down that route, however, with many appeals and the question of how we draw the line and actually measure. It is not that simple.

We may outline why we made a certain pitch as a committee last year. I stress this was not the destination but was an intermediate stop on the way. The challenge all the time is whether we should go for broke and maybe get very little or go for something less and maybe get it and build on it. That is something only we can judge in the circumstance at the time. I will go very briefly through the problem with the pitch we made with our budget submission. We suggested the income limits, allowing that our view was the Government was unlikely to abolish them in one go, would be increased to €500 and €1,000. In other words, they would be increased to €1,000 for a couple and €500 for a single person. The Minister did something for us on that one but nothing like we asked for. We wanted a very significant jump in one go. The second one particularly affects families. It does not affect older people as much, in other words, people caring for older people and particularly older people caring for older people. We also suggested in assessing the means that mortgage or rent costs would be deductible.

I imagine that for many families, that significant reduction would be of assistance in terms of the means test. The idea behind that proposal was to focus on the types of people who are before the committee today, who probably have a mortgage or rent costs. Other people I know from dealing with them in my clinic, such as older people, have gone beyond that stage of their lives.

A bugbear of mine that goes way beyond carer's allowance is the crazy issue of assessment of capital. I would love, and I think we all would, to get in one go to a place where capital for means-tested payments is assessed on the same basis as the medical card - on the actual income that is earned from the capital, which these days is virtually nil. However, given that we were not likely to get to the end game in one go, we suggested going from €20,000 to €50,000 for the disregard. The advantage of taking that approach was that we got the €50,000 disregard. This is the limit. Then we suggested that after that, the next €10,000 would be assessed at €10 per week. The big change we were suggesting was that after that, it would never go beyond €2 per week. This was a step on the road. The reason for that was to prove that this will not cost the Exchequer much. In my view, the capital assessment change would not cost much. However, it seems impossible to me, as someone who has fought this battle with the Department for years, to get them to see that. The only way of doing it is on an experimental basis. We must prove our point and then take the next steps.

I am outlining what we made the pitch for last year and why we made it. I do not think anyone who deals with people in a constituency clinic and listens to them, and who encounters the challenges faced by the three witnesses today, would not agree with the destination. While we agree on it, how do we get there?