Mr. John Dunne:

Senator O'Donnell asked about the 900,000 hours and €4.7 billion and asked if people were paid. They are not and we do not suggest everybody should be paid. Looking at it internationally, Ireland is particularly generous in its income supports to family carers. The other side of the coin is that we have relatively few other supports to family carers. The third factor is that it is extremely difficult to qualify for carer's allowance. One must be able to show that one is working full-time, more than 40 hours. While this is not the current guideline, because it is applied in practice, one must work full-time to get one's allowance. The difference between carer's allowance and jobseeker's benefit is not enough to justify 40 hours a week of hard work.

Young carers can be broken into three groups. There are young carers for whom their situation is good, normal family living. Every family has challenges and one expects and hopes that everybody would gather around. There are young people who are under an unusual degree of stress in terms of what they are being called on to do in a family situation but it is manageable. In a minority of cases the situation is tantamount to child abuse and we must examine that. We need to view those three categories differently. The normal family life situation is fine. In the other situations we try to provide support, part of which is to ensure the systems in which they operate recognise their particular circumstances and challenges.

The young people who have inappropriate levels of responsibility must be dealt with in a different way. The system is under enormous pressure and if anybody picks up the pieces, the system tends to sit back, take a sigh of relief and say it is fine. In some situations, even if the young carer and the person who is being cared for are both professing satisfaction with the situation, it is possible to examine it objectively and say it is not morally acceptable, probably is not sustainable, and needs intervention before it turns into a crisis.

I completely acknowledge Senator Moloney's work on seeking respite breaks as a way of compensating for the cut in the respite care grant. Although we are still muddling away at that and there has been no major breakthrough, we are engaged constructively in a process and we will see where it goes. The Department floated the idea of the two halves around the time of the respite care grant cut, when trust among the organisations was so low that there was profound suspicion about any idea of change in the system. We are considering it and are ready to say it possibly has merits.

I thank the Senator for clarifying the issue of the 13 weeks in hospital. If a person goes into long-term care, the carer's allowance stops immediately. If a person goes into hospital for more than 13 weeks and has not been able to move to a step-down bed or some other facility, their carer faces losing the carer's allowance and the travel card. I know carers who are travelling four hours per day to visit people in hospital. From the carer's point of view, the person may yet come home. These are very hard, exceptional cases. I am not saying the Department should give everybody everything but that it should examine more carefully the transition from the carer phase in terms of income support.

While it is great if communication is starting to happen between the Revenue Commissioners and the Department of Social Protection, technically the carer is liable and that is a worry. Having fought, in some cases for two years, to get a carer's allowance, a person receives a piece of paper which on the front says, "Congratulations, you have a carer's allowance," and in small print on the back says, "P.S. You are obliged to tell Revenue you are now in receipt of this allowance". Nobody ever follows it. While we promote it through the organisation, when somebody has fought for two years for the allowance, it is not top of his or her list to inform the Revenue Commissioners. However in three years time, if Revenue has not collected money, technically that carer will be hit with a big bill. This is avoidable and unreasonable and carers have enough to worry about without that.