Ms Clare Duffy:

I acknowledge Deputy Tully for all the work she does. She is a co-chair of the Oireachtas cross-party interest group on family carers. She has been brilliant and I acknowledge all the work she has done.

I do not have much to add to what has been said other than to raise another issue in respect of housing. My colleague, Mr. Andrew Rooney, has done brilliant work in research across local authorities and looking at how each local authority treats and assesses caring households for the purposes of the differential rent scheme. He has a table that shows that the difference between the local authority with the lowest and highest levels of assessment for the scheme is approximately 80%. There is an enormous difference in the rent rates. It is within the autonomy of each local authority to include or exclude the half-rate carer's allowance or to assess carer's allowance at the basic rate. All local authorities have autonomy to assess it as they wish. The piece of work showing the differences is very interesting. The Department is due to do a review of the differential rent scheme. It is one of the commitments in the programme for Government that it will standardise differential rents across the country. I understand from the Department that is not going to be open to public consultation. We will submit that work without being invited to do so.

Going back to the register and how we figure out respite, where do we go with this? One of the things I mentioned earlier, and I must be careful of my language here, is that within the Department of Social Protection, there will be a new way that long-term carers will be assessed for contributory State pension purposes form 1 June 2024. One of the biggest challenges that the Department of Social Protection has now, and the Pensions Commission had in the past, is how to identify who these carers are. How do we know that, say, Clare Duffy cared for someone for 20 years while Catherine Cox only cared for someone for 16 years? How do we know that? The spirit of this new rule is that one should not have had to have been getting carer's allowance previously. The Department had to figure out that problem. It has created a register where carers can register themselves as in that category. It is almost a self-declaration so there is a lot of trust involved. Something similar could be done in respect of respite. Is it up to the State to figure out where every person who needs respite is in every pocket of the country? Perhaps it is up to us to come forward and say, for example, that I live in Connemara and have a child with autism. I know there may be problems around the general data protection regulation, GDPR, but that may be a start we need to consider.