Colm Burke (Cork North Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I have to leave to go to another meeting. On the scale of the issue we are facing, last year, 305,000 new PPS numbers were issued. Some 69,000 were to Irish people. The remaining numbers were issued to people from 202 different countries. Some 68,000 were issued to Ukrainians, about 18,000 to people from Brazil and 21,000 to people from India. All of them are coming here and working. If any one of them ended up with a health problem, is there support available for them?

To give an example, I know a couple who came in on student visas in 2016. They have a child who is a year and a half old who is not entitled to get children's allowance because they were here on student visas. She has since been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Where do we even start in trying to sort that problem out? That is the kind of thing I am talking about. She does not want to go back home because she feels she would not get the supports. They are paying something like €700 a month for an apartment. He is only entitled to work 20 hours a week because he has a student visa. I have a file in front of me, and I am not sure where I am going to start. That is the kind of challenge that we now have. They come at us in so many different ways. The question is whether we can set up enough structures to give supports to people in that kind of scenario.