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

I am very aware of the issue of epilepsy. We are looking at it. I take the points that were made. I have a close family friend who has epilepsy and cannot drive. It is not easy. We are looking at that and I am happy to engage with the committee on it.

On the fuel allowance, I was delighted to get the agreement for the over-70s and the increase in the means test. As we all know, when one gets older, one gets colder. I do not want old people to be afraid to turn on the heating, so this has been very welcome. We all saw the marginal cases where a person was €2 or €3 over and could not get the fuel allowance. It is expected that up to 64,000 new households will qualify for the fuel allowance. We have also increased the limits for those under the age of 70. At the end of December, there were 394,000 fuel allowance recipients. All of the chat around the fuel allowance paid off because we had around 370,000 recipients previously, but this had increased to 394,000 by the end of December. That is good news. By the end of December, more than 3,200 new applications had been received through the online service. Up to the end of December, more than 43,000 new paper applications had been received by the pensions unit, which is an increase of 130% compared to 2021. Many people are getting their applications in at the minute and we are processing them as quickly as we can. There is an online application but a lot of people want a paper-based application. We are getting through them. When the fuel allowance application is received, it will be backdated to 1 January. It will take us a wee while to work through them all as there is a huge volume of stuff coming in at the minute. Those are the most recent figures I have, if that is okay. Deputies can rest assured that we want to get them churned out. Those who have not received it should not worry because when they do get it, it will be backdated to 1 January.