Ms Clare Duffy:

The Senator asked how we can figure out whether 6,000 is the complete figure. Of course, we cannot do so. We can only work off approximates. I am terribly bad at explaining figures and I will be squinting at everything. The closest approximate figure we have to the number of genuine full-time family carers who provide care to someone who has been medically assessed as needing full-time care is the number of people who receive the annual carer's support grant. It is not means tested. The only difference between it and carer's allowance is that the carer's support grant is not means tested.

In 2021, 115,000 people received this grant. There were 91,000 people in receipt of carer's allowance and 3,000 people received the carer's benefit. We also have 51,000 children who received domiciliary care allowance. All of these people get the carer's support grant. There is double counting. Many of the 91,000 who get the carer's support grant because they get carer's allowance do not get it twice because the child is also getting the domiciliary care allowance. There is all of this double counting. The only way we can measure how many people would be brought into the net is to look at how many of these people receive the carer's support grant as a stand-alone payment and get nothing else. It is the one thing they get every year. From discussing this and speaking to very helpful people in Longford the closest figure we can come up with is approximately 6,000.

I will break down this 6,000. We absolutely know that 4,363 carers received the carer's support grant in June last year as a stand-alone payment. Peppered throughout the year are manual applications that can be received until the end of the year. They can also come in until the end of the following year. There is an average every year of approximately 2,000. We can say roughly that anywhere between 6,000 and 7,000, and 7000 is at the generous end, will be brought into the net. This is the closest approximate we have but it is not a bad one. It is not the only cost because, as I said earlier, 50% of carers on a reduced rate will have that increased. We would need a PhD and a calculator for this one.