Séamus Healy (Tipperary South, Workers and Unemployed Action Group)

I support this motion and commend the Technical Group on introducing it. The first thing we must realise is that life for families where there is one or more children with special needs is a daily struggle. All of us in this House see parents on a daily basis who explain exactly what life is like for them. It is a struggle and as parents get older they worry how the children will be cared for after their deaths.

Parents have told us today how they must fight for everything. On many occasions, they are not listened to, particularly early on, and if there had been an early diagnosis there would be a better outcome. Unfortunately, it is often much too late when the diagnosis is made. There are waiting lists for speech therapy and psychological assessments of up to two years. Suddenly the child is five or six, or even in some cases ten or 11, before the diagnosis is made and a person can start to look for the support services. That is a huge problem for parents.

Families in this situation should be supported and should not have to worry about the domiciliary care allowance. As others have said, the loss of the €309 per month domiciliary care allowance leads to the loss of the carer's allowance, as much as €204 per week, and the household benefits package. Those are significant losses. The vast majority, if not all, of these parents will not be working. They will be at home looking after the child. In the event of the domiciliary care allowance being lost, it does not mean the person can go to work. They must stay at home to look after the children but without the assistance of the domiciliary care allowance and carer's allowance to allow them to avail of support services. The Department should, as called for in the motion, review the scheme and ensure a reasonable timeframe is put in place. We have asked for a period of seven weeks, a reasonable timeframe for a decision on these applications.

This is only the tip of the iceberg in the social welfare area. Headline rates have not been changed, which was built up as a huge commitment by the Labour Party in particular before the last election, but that has acted as a smoke screen for dismantling other social welfare services and benefits, services that have been hard won by generations of workers and their unions. There have been cuts in jobseeker's allowance, reductions in the time period for jobseeker's allowance, reduction in the time period for illness benefit, increases in the pension age, increases in the number of contributions for widow's and State pensions, the abolition of the half rate illness benefit, the abolition of the half rate jobseeker's benefit, cuts in the fuel allowance, cuts in heating benefits and they go on and on. I believe the instruction has gone out, be it written, verbal or even unspoken, from the Department that the criteria for all these schemes might not have changed on paper but there is a new strictness in their implementation. That is a scandal and it should be overturned.

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