Róisín Shortall (Dublin North West, Labour)

I move amendment No. 7:

In page 6, between lines 7 and 8, to insert the following:

3.—The Minister shall as soon as may be after the passing of this Act prepare and lay before both Houses of the Oireachtas a report on extending the number of hours a week a Carer may be gainfully employed while still retaining entitlement to Carer's Allowance/Benefit.

Both of these amendments relate to carers. We know from the recent census that 161,000 people provide care to elderly people or people with a disability and yet only one in five is in receipt of a carer's payment. Some 67,000 carers spend more than 15 hours per week caring while 50,000 spend more than 29 hours per week caring and yet only 35,000 get a weekly payment. The combination of the means test and the working hours rule is precluding many carers from receiving any kind of payment. It is a catch-22 situation for many people who provide care to a loved one but who must hold down a job to survive.

The point I made on Committee Stage was that rather than have an arbitrary figure of 15 hours per week in terms of the hours worked a much more satisfactory test would be to ask whether the care provided to an elderly or a disabled person enables him or her to stay out of a nursing home or institutional care. Surely that should be the test applied. There are many situations where a person providing an hour's care in the morning and in the evening and at critical times enables a person to stay at home.

One must take into consideration the inadequacy of the home help service in the community and the cutbacks in the number of hours. I accept more funding has been provided and that home helps are on a better rate, which they should be, but very often that means the overall number of hours available is reduced in many communities. It is sometimes very hard for people providing care to keep the show on the road and to enable the person being cared for to remain in his or her home with the proper care, in some kind of comfort and stay out of a nursing and to be able to pay the bills.

I would like to see some flexibility. The rules, as they apply at present, are too severe. The fact that only 21% of carers are in receipt of a payment would testify to that fact. That is the reason I tabled these two amendments.

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