Regina Doherty (Meath East, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The Deputy would have to ask.

The carers allowance and all of our schemes are statutory schemes. I appreciate that it does not seem to make sense to the lady who has already applied successfully for the full carers allowance for her son. When she makes an application for her daughter, despite the fact that it is only half a carers allowance it is still a new application and under the law it has to be deemed to be adjudicated in exactly the same way as if the Deputy or I or somebody we knew applied for the first time. Each application has to be taken on its own merit. That is just the way the law is.

Budget negotiations for this year have not started so I cannot answer the Deputy's second question. Obviously, it will be defined and determined by the amount of fiscal space available from the Department of Finance. The only thing I can say to the Deputy is that there are 6,000 people working in my Department. They are there to serve the people who need help at certain periods of their life. They do not take 20 weeks to go through an application just because they want to annoy somebody. We have times and targets available based on either the volume of applications we get or the length of time needed to do the work. For these three particular payments, most have to go through a medical assessor or there is a requirement to really genuinely assess the care that is being given to a person. It takes times. Some cases are taking longer. Sometimes a reason for that is that we do not get the information in the first instance. We want to make sure that we streamline it and make it as easy as we possibly can so that we reduce the numbers of weeks.

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