Heather Humphreys (Cavan-Monaghan, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

As the Deputy will be aware, DCA finishes at age 16 and then, as Deputy Ó Cuív has said, many people move onto disability allowance. By the way, Ms Tracy McGinnis is now an Irish citizen. She got her citizenship late last year and I was delighted to see that.

I do not want to talk about specific cases. I will put it this way. People who have children on the disability allowance are often carers themselves. If they are receiving the carer's payment, they will get that paid for the extra 12 weeks if the person they are caring for has passed away. When a person is receiving the disability payment in his or her own right, anybody who collects that money for him or her is deemed an agent. What we would be doing then would be paying the agent for another 12 weeks following the demise of the recipient of the payment. We can look at it. We always look at these issues. It could have further far-reaching unintended consequences, if the Deputy knows what I mean. I am happy to look at it.

Going back to the issue of carers, the payment for carers was something that was brought up with me on many occasions at this committee. The Chairman, Deputy Kerrane and others brought it up on a number of occasions. Everybody wanted this changed and I changed it. I changed the means test for the carer's allowance the year before last and that was welcomed.

The pension issue is being dealt with by us now. A person who is a long-term carer caring for more than 20 years will get credits. However, we have to do a bit of work on that because we have to make sure people were caring. We have the carer's allowance information but there are people who were not getting carer's allowance of any kind because they did not qualify for it. We have to find out where they are and we have to try to develop a register. We will work on that with the carer organisations, such as family carers.