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

I was listening upstairs, so I am aware of what was said in the submissions. We are a social welfare committee and it is obvious that other issues that have been raised are more appropriate to the Joint Committee on Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth. I will, therefore, focus solely on social welfare because that is where we can give the most help.

The no-brainer at the beginning is to just increase the foster care allowance in line with inflation from 2009. Something is going to have to happen there or otherwise its value will go down rapidly. I take it that if that happened, it would be a considerable start, although the witnesses might aim for a lot more. We have people in every week with all sorts of requests. Ms Corridon says she is a vet. It is like any farmer at the fair. The issue is what is realistic right across the board in all of the very valid, contending demands but this is a particular case as nothing has happened since 2009. Most welfare rates have gone up in the meantime so that is sensible.

The second point that strikes me, if I understood correctly, was that in some care orders there is a requirement that the foster carer gives up work. I am trying to latch it on to some existing payment rather than create a totally new payment. The definition of the carer's allowance is that one gives somebody full-time care and attention. It seems that rather than having to apply and make the case that there is full-time care and attention involved, where foster parents have to give full-time care and attention, by definition, that entitles them to the carer's allowance. That would mean they would get a weekly payment over and above the foster care allowance, which I understand is to pay for the child. That is something we could look at as a committee. I am interested in hearing the reaction of the witnesses to that. Sometimes it is easier to get something when amending an existing scheme than creating a brand new one.

I do not want to get too technical on the credits and pensions but, like everything else, it is technical. I will try to keep it simple. A credit is as good as a paid contribution if, first, one has ten years paid from the time one started work to the time one reaches pension age. That could be achieved in gaps and reached by adding a bit here and a bit there, but one has to have 520 contributions paid sometime in one's life, between whatever time one started working, which could include holiday work and so on. It is not confined to full-time work. As long as one earns €38 a week, one gets an A-rated stamp, but one has to have ten years. I am curious to find out if the witnesses know or could find out how many foster parents would get caught by that, allowing for a child being with them for 20 or 23 years, depending on the age he or she is fostered at.

This would be, for example, 20 years out of a 40-year working life. How many people will find the ten-year paid contributions a problem?

The next issue is of huge constraint, which is the 12 years and after. If it is birth to age 12, or if the family got the child at two or three years old, it would be three to 12 years and so on. There is an issue when the child is 12 years of age. I definitely believe there is a case for an exception to be made here. If the foster parent is required to be there until the child reaches the age of 23 then it is a very reasonable case. It is about the term limits we come up against. People are all the time coming into the clinic to see me where they have their pensions and so on and perhaps they are trying to get the care years credit, depending on the size of the family and all sorts of things, including caring for elderly people. There is a limit, however, on the credit someone can get, which is 20 years. The credits might be due to being out with illness, being unemployed, or due to caring credits. The total limit is 20 years. One might jump out of the fire, if the limit is raised to 23 years of age for fostering. Because a person may have been ill, or may be ill in the future, or if a person was unemployed, or ends up on credits for all sorts of reasons, he or she may hit the 20-year ceiling. It would seem to me that if they got rid of the 12-year limit and instead raised it to 23 years in the case of foster care, and if we got rid of the 20-year credit ceiling in the case of fostering, then all would be left is the barrier to the credit being as good as the stamp. This is what I am trying to get at. At some stage in a person's career he or she would have had to put up 520 contributions. I should not use the word "stamp"; it is very old-fashioned of me. When I started working they were actually stamps that one put on a card. Would the ten-year contribution clause cause a problem? Do the witnesses foresee it causing a problem for many? Would most of the foster carers have worked before they fostered and perhaps returned to work once the fostering was finished and the child was over a certain age? This is where I can see we might go in the short term. Is this the kind of direction that would help to make it much more likely, while not absolutely cast iron, to get a contributory pension? Would this help to do something with the foster care allowance? Would it help to say that, by definition, foster carers are entitled to the carer's credit?