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

Colleagues have raised issues about CE, Tús and RSS and their operation. I will come back to the issue of carer's allowance, in the context of national Carers Week and the request that we received from the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine regarding the need for flexibility for farm participants in receipt of the allowance. Deputy Ó Cuív put it quite well earlier regarding the availability of the farmer. Usually, the farmer is taking care of an older person who is in the house with him or her. The farmer is, at worst, farming in the vicinity of the home.

Surely, with the development of technology and the roll-out of 4G technology, which is pretty much universal throughout the country, it would be possible to have a situation in which, even when a farmer is away from the family home, he or she can still continue to monitor the older person and can be there within minutes should he or she fall or need to go to the bathroom. Should we not, in circumstances such as that, use technology to provide that level of reassurance that the Department, quite rightly, requires in the provision of full-time care, while providing the flexibility that would assist smallholders, in particular? That is usually who we are talking about in the context of the carer's allowance.

With regard to flexibility, an issue raised in evidence we received from Family Carers Ireland related to the number of full-time students who are being knocked off the carer's allowance. Many of them were young carers who were caring, usually for a parent, while they were in second level. However, once they register for a third level course, they are automatically knocked off. Surely there could be some flexibility with hybrid learning. My understanding, from the evidence that we received, is that not only are the teaching hours being calculated, the reading hours are also being calculated in meeting the 18-and-a-half-hour threshold.

The point Deputy Ó Cuív made was that, in many instances, it is about having someone physically present in or close to the house. A student can as easily read a book online or a hard copy at home in his or her own sitting room as in the library. In fairness, most third level institutions will try to facilitate a young carer in every way they can and there is now an awful lot more adaptability with remote learning. Surely, the Department should take a more flexible approach to that. The point was made in evidence to us that the student could be at home reading an academic book and be denied the carer's allowance. However, if the student is at home reading fiction, he or she is eligible for a carer's allowance. That does not seem right. I ask the Department representatives to address that.

What I will say about the 18-and-a-half-hour threshold will not come as a surprise to Mr. Hession, because I am blue in the face at this stage with regard to this. We have a small cohort of people who are the life-carers of children with a disability who are either in an education or training centre during the day. They can only work up to 18 and a half hours outside of the home. We still have the income threshold, as a limiting factor in how much they can work, but there should be flexibility beyond those 18 and a half hours in those small number of instances where the person to whom they are providing care is not physically present in the house and is either in school or in a training centre, purely from the point of view of mental health and of being able to engage with a workforce, because, sadly, in many instances, they will have to re-engage with the workforce at some future date. Those three anomalies, if addressed, would deal with a number of the grievances that we have heard in evidence over the past number of weeks.