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

It is all about perspective. Somebody has only failed when he or she has stopped or given up. The Department will never stop or give up looking after the people who are most in need. To put it in context, there are currently 78,681 people who applied for carer's benefit last year. Fewer than 1,000 were refused on appeal. That is a tiny number by anybody's standards. There is a marked difference between the answer to the Deputy and the one in June, though I do not know who I gave that answer to in June. The question asked in June is the same question that the Deputy is asking me now except that we have recruited the extra staff that I said we would recruit in June. We have the new carer's application form that I said we were designing in co-operation with the Care Alliance and Family Carers Ireland that is ready to go live, with our general practitioners and medical assessment, for applicants for and recipients of carer's allowance from next year. All of the advances we said we would do have been done and the carer's application time is coming down. It was 18 weeks at the beginning of this year. It went to 17 weeks in the middle of the year and is thankfully now 16 weeks. I am sorry if the Deputy does not like my tone but it is nowhere close to the 12 weeks-----

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