Ms Catherine Cox:

To go back to what Deputy Ó Cuív said about short-term and long-term goals, I agree to an extent. That is why we are calling for the abolition of the means test and for a new fairer payment to be introduced. In our pre-budget submissions over the past 20 years, we have also asked for increases in thresholds so that we at least bring more family carers into the net. However, we have been calling for this for more than 20 years and honestly the time has to be now. As I said, family carers save our State €20 billion. They feel degraded by the questions. It is a stress on top of a very stressful situation many are already in. It would be very targeted towards full-time family carers providing 24-7 care and we feel the time is right now. In the short term, we want to see more increases in the income threshold and more carers brought in, but the means test needs to be abolished. It cannot be in five or ten years' time. We need to see it in the next two years.