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

I agree with the principle of what we are trying to achieve here. When partial capacity was introduced back in the budget of 2011, the thinking at the time was that it would extend the disability allowance and that we would move forward from where we were. I agree with the basic or big principles, but of course, like everything else, the detail is what really counts at the end of the day. That is what the argument is likely to be about.

Mr. Hession talked about a unitary system encompassing disability, invalidity, the blind pension and so on. We have discussed at this committee previously the differences in the medical qualification criteria for disability and invalidity payments. We would be in favour of making invalidity like disability. If a person has been a blocklayer all of their life and only has a primary education, there is no point in saying they could have got a job as a nuclear scientist. The measure in the context of disability, which is whether a person is capable of doing the work for which he or she has education and training, within reason, is a better measure. Is it intended under the new system to unify it and use one set of criteria? If so, which criteria will be used?

I have read the documentation submitted to the committee but I have not read the whole Green Paper. There are references in some places to the severity of a disability and the cost of disability and then there is talk about the ability to work. Is a person's eligibility for the extra payments proposed to be based around an ability to work or the cost of his or her disability? A person could have a very high-cost disability but still have a good ability to work, for example. Is it based on the severity of the disability? My memory of partial capacity was that the severity of the disability was the primary focus, not the person's ability to work per se. To a certain extent, a person's ability to work depends on what he or she is qualified to do, where he or she can do it from and so on.

My next question relates to something that jumped out at me, as it were, from the paper. Mr. Hession quoted a figure of between €9,482 and €11,734, contained in an Indecon report, as being the cost of disability. If that is the cost of disability that falls on the person with the disability, and I presume that is extra costs above costs incurred by people who do not have a disability, it amounts to between €182 and €225 per week. At the moment the Department is only paying €220 per week, so clearly it is not paying people with a severe disability anything. I presume that in the Indecon report, some of those costs are not directly borne by the person with the disability but would include pay for care assistants and so on.

The paper work we got was not exactly clear on that. I saw some commentary in the media saying that we need to give another €200 a week but some of these, I understood, were not direct costs on the person but costs on the State that need to be provided through supports and so on. I ask the Department officials to clarify this issue because it has a huge bearing on what we are thinking about.

My next issue is something I favour but it must be handled very sensitively. Currently, a person on domiciliary care allowance transfers to a disability allowance as long as the disability is still of such a nature that the person is unlikely to get work. The allowance is transferred when a person is 16 years of age and it is proposed to raise the age to 18 years. This proposal was made many times before and caused a lot of angst. In favour of the proposal, and I am personally in favour of it but we need to handle this very carefully, is giving somebody at 16 years of age that kind of money for themselves. You would not give it to anybody else, disabled or non-disabled. Parents have come to me to say that they did not agree with paying the allowance to the recipient as opposed to the parent at 16 or 17 years of age. The counter argument is that the disability allowance is far in excess money wise of the domiciliary care allowance and, therefore, people have contacted me to ask for us to leave the arrangement as it is because irrespective of who gets the money there will be more money going into the household this way. Has thought been given to how to do that migration and whether there should be a higher level of domiciliary care allowance for the 16 and 17-year-old as part of this transition? I ask because in principle I am in favour of the first but I can see the practical consequences of the second, particularly for low-income families.

Finally, I have long had the belief, both in theory and in practice, from my experience of life, dealing with people and having employed people and so on, about the requirement to be available for and actively seeking work. I think that the requirement to not be working is vital for jobseeker's allowance. However, I have always been of the view regarding actively seeking work that there is a small cohort of people, anybody that you have to force by law to be actively seeking work, you would not employ anyway and most employers would not want them. There is the old saying you can bring the horse to water but you cannot make the horse drink. In terms of people who do not want to work, and there are very few of them, some people for different reasons are incompatible of holding down a job. If the requirement was changed it would stop unnecessary migration. Arising from that, I would be very interested in knowing, and I think we have asked for this before, the number of refusals. I think the Leas-Chathaoirleach asked for the figure specifically, if I remember right. I would like to know the number of refusals in the last three years, year-by-year, of applications for disability allowance on medical grounds only. That data would give us some feel of this migration issue. We have all come across people who run into trouble over the ability to work clause and attending courses, and maybe have a personality issue that makes that difficult. The only way out is to tell them to go and apply for this disability allowance even though they might not have a very significant visible disability in a classical medical sense. It would be useful if this committee had these figures on the refusal of disability allowance, particularly disability allowance, which means the person had not worked before but even for invalidity on medical grounds I ask that because we must look at why there are so many applications being refused, if that is correct that there are a lot of applications being refused. Overall, this would be a step forward. It would be great if people with disability, that inhibits mobility and so on which means more care and more costs, were to get more money. I do agree that it is not quite so simple as to say everybody gets it.