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

I thank the witnesses for the interesting presentation. There is a lot wrong with the system and it is not just the carer’s allowance. There was an interesting comment earlier about marginalised people applying for the carer's allowance and the challenges of bureaucracy . As members of this committee will know, it is my hobby horse to point out that marginalised people face significant intrusion, whether they are going for social welfare, a means-tested payment or whatever they are going for. People on the disability allowance go through this rigmarole too. It applies to a huge class of people politicians such as us deal with, because we deal with every system where people are means tested, and they tend to be the most disadvantaged in our society. It is well known in this committee that I have a hang-up about means-testing. It is totally iniquitous and unfair and needs significant reform, and I have put a lot of time and effort into trying to bring that reform about.

There are always choices to be made, and when you are sitting on this side of the table, you have to look across. The issues that arise, when we come to disability, illness and so on, relate, for example, to the cost of disability, which is a massive issue, and the means-testing of the disability allowance. I have often given the case of somebody who is born with a difficult disability, such as Ms Thyne’s child. If, when they get to 40 or 50 years of age, please God, someone passes away and leaves them a legacy, they will lose their disability allowance and will never have an opportunity to get the invalidity pension, in a lot of cases. There are huge injustices, and if we try to sort them all out in one year, we will hit the wall because for everything we give out, we have to get the money for it somewhere, and that is taxation.

There is no third way. If we borrow in the short term, we will pay in the long term.

The committee has discussed the issue of means-testing and we are very cognisant of it. The uncertainty of just abolishing it overnight is going to be a huge barrier to any Minister within a Department trying to make progress. When this committee was formed, we proposed in our first budget submission means tests of €500 and €1,000, which would cover a lot of people. If a couple were involved, they would take half the income, so that would amount to €2,000, which is beginning to move up considerably. One of the advantages of going that way, and I would be interested to hear the witnesses' views on this, is that if we increased it incrementally and set it at €1,000, and €500 for a single person, we would need also to reform how issues would be assessed such as a second property, where a capital value is taken on an absolutely farcical notion of value. The same is true if the person happens to have savings and the way they are assessed. In fairness to the Minister, she did improve it and she has done things for the carer’s allowance. She has not done them for all the other means-testing and we are still arguing about that, but it has been changed slightly for the disability allowance as well. The idea of assessing at €4 per €1,0000 is ludicrous after €70,000. There are some aspects, therefore, that need to be reformed.

If we look at the €1,000 we were aiming for, we will then find out what the decrease is in the number of people getting the carer's support grant only. That would give us a much better fix on our next step, if we were trying to get to the point of abolishing the means test, whereby we would be able to assess a little more accurately whether it was worth having a means test for the remainder. It goes back to the old argument about the child benefit.

These look like modest reforms but they involve going inexorably in one direction and, in fairness to the Minister, she has raised the figure twice this term. The other reform that could take place immediately would be to increase the carer's beneift to five years. There is no means test for the carer's benefit. Again, this would give us a figure. Very few people come to my office regarding the carer's benefit, partly because there is no means test and partly, perhaps, because it relates to a demographic that can do their own business with the State. If we extended the carer's benefit to five years and had no means test, we would again get some sense, in a controlled way, of the potential costs and we would move away from the argument of whether it was €1.2 billion or €379 billion, which the big bang theory gives. The public service will always warn about the higher number and that will go to the Department of Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Reform, and if any of the witnesses has had experience with that Department or the Department of Finance, they will know they would want to have their arguments lined up because those Departments just look at figures and they do not want something like that. Could the benefit be changed in one go or should we know where the end game is and work incrementally towards it?

My second question relates to what would happen if a lot of money were available and concerns widening the eligibility versus increasing the rate. That becomes a challenge. Everything is finite from the Department's point of view. There are endless demands and it does not matter which Department it is. We can play around with Departments and call it what we want but it is still money and the Department of Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Reform does not care what we call it. It is always money. If the witnesses had a fixed sum available to them, would increasing the payment or the eligibility be the more urgent action to take?

I would be interested in getting the witnesses' view on that.

The issue of a working age payment was mentioned. How would that work? Many pensioners receive half-rate carer's allowance because many people are looking after their partners or spouses, doing incredible work for their families, themselves, the people they love and society. We found during Covid-19 that, all things being equal, the State should facilitate people caring at home where that is their choice. I would be interested in the witnesses’ reaction to extending carer’s benefit to five years, as a first step, continuing to increase the means-test threshold and amending the means test in terms of capital. That is a big issue, particularly as it can happen that a person being cared for has suffered a trauma and become severely disabled due to an accident and could, as a result, get a large award that would go against him or her. It can get very practical and technical but we keep coming across these cases.

Medical criteria were mentioned. We had a big debate and found recently that the means test is relatively easy compared to satisfying the medical card criteria. In the old days, a person got the rub of the green at oral hearings and so on. I raised a case here previously where a carer's mother had terminal cancer and was receiving hospice care, and the carer was refused for the third time three weeks before she died. That is becoming an intrusive and difficult area. These are the real cases. Someone spoke of having a State agency. There is already a great State agency, known as public representatives who are paid by the public purse. The great advantage of our doing much of this work is that it informs our policy development. When I was doing science we were taught about working things out in theory and then doing the practical to see whether it would work in practice. We are working all of this out in practice because we face all the people in difficulties and with literacy issues. I have some constituents who are not familiar with reading and writing, never mind State forms, and I try to explain it to them. We do much of the work for them. It seems we are always in the laboratory, even though we are not theoreticians in this. Those are some of the issues.

I will give the example of a farmer who looks after his mother. He got a form about a review. The reviews are constant. He was asked how many hours of work he did on the farm every week. It is a small farm in Connemara, which is around the house. He is in and out. Obviously, what he did was put down three hours a day, seven days a week. That totals 21 hours a week and exceeded the 18.5 hours allowed, which means, technically, "Out you go”. There are difficulties. I am not blind to them. I would be interested in the witnesses’ responses to those questions because these are where we all move forward together in a practical sense.