Ms Clare Duffy:

I will speak specifically to the statutory register. We must acknowledge that there is no one single repository where we can identify all family carers in Ireland. How we do that is one of the issues. We were lucky enough to meet the Commission on Pensions. We spent a lot of time talking about it. If we are to have a pension solution for carers, first of all that pension solution is only for long-term carers. This is defined as someone who is caring for more than 20 years. They will have been out of the workforce for so long that they can never plug that gap in their PRSI record after 20 years. How do we even begin to identify those people? We cannot use the question "Did you get carer's allowance for the past 20 years?" because that is essentially a means test on that pension solution. Can we look at who was claiming tax reliefs or caring tax reliefs? No we cannot, because this is also incomplete. As I said earlier, the most complete proxy albeit imperfect that we have at the minute is the number of people who receive the annual carer's support grant. This is about 115,000 carers who provide full-time care and have been medically assessed as providing care to someone in need of full-time care. That process would be imperfect also. The commission's recommendations in the report was that they would work with stakeholders. I believe they named Family Carers Ireland among those. The commission would work with stakeholders and the Government to establish to establish a statutory register. I am not sure this register would sit under the unit that Professor Lynch has spoken of but it would seem like the logical place, with support from our sector. I am not sure. It is definitely needed.

During the pandemic, we lobbied for carers to be prioritised on the vaccination priority list as they were in Northern Ireland, where I am from, and as they were in the UK. It did not happen, but even if we had wanted it to, it could not happen because we did not have a register to identify carers. Such a register exists in the UK but the register in the UK sits with the general practitioners. It is held by the GP practice.