Ms Gráinne Loughran:

I might add, in respect of housing adaptation grants, that 13,000 grants will be funded in 2024. That is lower than the 13,500 grants that were funded in 2010. Since then, the population of people aged 65 and over has increased from approximately 515,000 to 806,000 people. The number of grants being funded is not keeping pace with the population. While it has been reported that there was an increase in Exchequer funding for the grants in budget 2024 to €75 million, that is not the case in reality. Several local authorities applied to the Department for additional funding last year, which resulted in a €75 million spend by the Exchequer on the grants. The funding for 2024 only replicates this. This goes back several years, in the context of waiting for local authorities to come knocking on doors to look for additional funding for those grants. In the meantime, as the committee will be aware, last year several of the local authorities closed access to the grants at several points during the year. They implemented spending restrictions and a broad range of ways to dampen down applications. Our support co-ordinators on the ground find that at times, when somebody needs a grant, it is more beneficial to wait and apply on 1 or 2 January. This is because the funding runs out midway through the year in some cases. It is incredibly difficult to access them in all cases, despite the various advocacy work that our support co-ordinators do locally.

The reason the housing adaptation grants are so important is because they are funded by the Department of housing. They are extremely relevant to health needs and there is a need for significantly more co-operation on that than is currently happening, that we are aware of. We are still waiting for the review of the grants. There was a commitment to publish the waiting lists for the housing adaptations by the end of 2019 but that has not been completed. We recognise that the Department of housing has a lot going on. This is, however, something we see as a health need. We recommend that members of this committee would perhaps consider looking at that too.