Dara Calleary (Mayo, Fianna Fail)

I thank the Chairman. I will keep Deputies O'Reilly, Wall and Hayes updated. We are in the very bottom part of the mountain in terms of climbing it, but the most important thing for me is that we get some sort of buy-in and agreement from the disability groups as to what this payment looks like. Second, Deputy O'Reilly is right. A lot of Departments are involved in this. The disability community, absolutely, but to go back to Deputy Hayes's previous point, the housing committee will have to be involved here as well. I am happy to come back in terms of the work of the strategic focus network.

As I said, we are in very early days. I propose sometime in the spring we will give an update as to where we are at. I would also point out that within this legislation there are a number of measures, including the €10 increase in the weekly rates of payment, which will be permanent. That will bring the maximum personal rate of disability allowance to €254 a week from January. As already said, we have the highest ever increases in the child support payment from €16 to €78 for children aged 12 or over and €8 to €58 for children 12 and over. There is a €20 increase in the rate of domiciliary care, which will bring the rate of DCA to €380 per month from next January. The fuel allowance has increased by €5. Importantly, people who are moving from disability allowance or the blind pension to take up work will be able to retain their fuel allowance payment for five years.

The back to work family dividend is being extended to the group where they have children. That has been one issue that has come back to me already. People who move from DA to take up employment are always worried that if, for whatever reason it does not work out that they are left without their benefits at a cliff edge. The second thing that we have done is that in the case of any person who moves from DA to employment and where that does not work out, the officials in the Department will get them back onto that payment very quickly. That was not always the way. We are trying to make sure the systems are in place to do that. We have also made changes to the wage subsidy scheme.

I am very focused in on in terms of increasing the opportunities for employment. I had a meeting with a super group. I recommend a meeting with the NOW Group in terms of what it is doing in this space. It would be really worthwhile to see what it is doing. Across disability allowance, the invalidity pension, the blind pension and domiciliary care allowance, we have made over €250 million in additional funding in this space for next year. I want to introduce a specific cost-of-disability payment but in the meantime, we have not been sitting on our hands, we are also investing in permanent increases across a range of other schemes as well.