Anne Rabbitte (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I will not be finished in a minute but I will do my best. Those in ALONE are meeting people on a day-to-day basis. The questions on the impact of poverty on people's day-to-day lives as well as the cost of energy have been answered. I am specifically interested in situations where somebody loses their partner and has to run the house on the one pension. He or she does not get the extra in the fuel allowance. I brought this up before.

The other piece is on foster carers. I did the sums and if we lost all the foster carers and had to use private residential care, it would cost €1.3 billion whereas foster carers only costs us €109 million. That is a statistic. When we look at it like that, of course, they should be included in the pension and we should not be means testing. Whoever decided on that, it needs to be reviewed completely. I loved the comments on extending aftercare to 23 years of age.

We had family carers in Loughrea who did phenomenal work. They were the group we went to when we could not get care from the HSE. If the allocation was extended to €2 million in the morning, does the organisation have the capacity to attract the staff? That is my question.