Jan O'Sullivan (Limerick City, Labour) | Oireachtas source

What we must try to do with these kinds of schemes is be fair to everybody and apply the same rules to everybody. I recognise that there may be individual cases of families in hardship but the scheme is revised every year and we make slight changes to it every year. We did make some small changes this year. There are income disregards, including some specified social protection payments, HSE payments, benefits such as child benefit and family income supplement, foster carer allowance, the household benefit package and the water conservation grant, which we included this year. There are a number of exemptions but the difficulty with a national scheme is that there are individual cases in respect of which one could say a certain individual should really be getting a grant. However, we must apply the same kinds of rules in terms of income across the board.

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