Willie Penrose (Longford-Westmeath, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I am proud and greatly honoured to have the opportunity on behalf of the Labour Party to propose this important motion seeking basic improvements on behalf of family carers. It is well known that I have had a long-term career, for some 25 years or more, in advocacy for and on behalf of carers. My interest in this area is not new founded, it is something that long and well established.

In 2015, the Central Statistics Office, CSO, found that one person in ten was providing care to someone with an illness or disability. On that basis, about 355,000 people in the population are carers. Roughly one in ten people in Ireland are carers today and this will increase to one in five by 2030 given the ageing demographic. The 355,000 people could in fact be 375,000 based on the latest CSO population figures published some months ago. Every one of those people has a different story. The stories we heard at family carer events across Ireland were heart-rending and would move anybody. They are familiar stories. Any of us involved in the caring movement know exactly what is involved. People are looking after their elderly parents, an elderly uncle or aunt or after a child with a disability. I spoke to a woman from the Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown area this evening. Her story would move anyone. She is looking after a 28 year old child and is working extremely hard. She went back to work and is now going back onto the carer's allowance. She has a difficult job to get it.

There are also less well known stories. People are working full-time and then acting as a carer around the clock for a spouse who is at home due to illness or disability. Children under the age of 18 are taking on significant caring responsibilities for their parents. We know that tens of thousands of children and teenagers, as young as ten years old, are providing care in this situation. The Minister of State, Deputy Stanton, a colleague of the Minister of State, Deputy Jim Daly, has been a great advocate in this area. Many people estimate that some 25,000 children and young people are in that situation. I believe that is a gross underestimate. There is talk now of an estimate of 56,000 young people providing care across Ireland.

People affected by disability or illness want to stay in their own homes. That is their most comfortable environment. A carer's allowance of €200 would assist in allowing that to happen, along with adequate respite care and home help. There is strong evidence that quality of life is improved and people live longer in their home environment. An immediate and achievable priority is to increase substantially the number of hours, homecare packages, and home help hours or alternatively, to establish the entitlement to secure the same outcome on a statutory framework. I acknowledge the efforts of the Minister of State, Deputy Jim Daly, in that regard. They are positive.

Carers do not want our sympathy or our pity. They also do not want to be put on a pedestal or canonised. They are just ordinary people struggling to care for their loved ones without the supports they so desperately need and deserve. Carers are people who have chosen to look after their loved ones and they do need help. They need practical help. Most importantly, what they often need is an acknowledgement of their role, which is often disregarded. That is what the State should be doing, that is how the State should intervene and that is what the State has to do better than it is doing. Carers need respite and training. Some need a downstairs bathroom at a critical time. Others require home help hours when those hours are needed and not when the system decides to grant them - if those people ever get the hours. That is, by hell, some system to try to navigate. It is no wonder that these people are at breaking point. Some carers just burn out and feel exhausted.

First and foremost, therefore, carers need financial support. Only one carer in five receives carer's allowance or carer's benefit. Those are the only payments in the social welfare system that I know of where it is necessary for people to work full time and still only get €16 more than if they sat at home resting on their hands. It is an invidious situation. Those payments are means-tested and the rules for the means test have not changed since 2008, despite the rising costs of living. People are being unfairly left without income support.

A major and cherished goal of mine and of the Labour Party has been our policy to try to abolish the means test. In 2003, I published a report entitled "Caring for The Carers". Our goal should be to abolish the means test but in the interim, I know we must face and deal with reality, such the impact of Brexit. In the interim, we should substantially increase the income disregard and the capital disregard. We should do that because when disability allowance is awarded, there is a cap on disregard of €50,000 but when carer's allowance is granted, the cap on disregard is €20,000. What is so different about carers? That difference is invidious and discriminatory.

I know this is not the area of responsibility of the Minister of State but I ask him to relay this situation to the Government. That is the simplest thing he could do today. I heard about another change today that we could make quickly. A special fund could be established tomorrow, in addition to homecare packages, for onset conditions. For example, stroke victims initially require a huge number of hours of caring but it is for a finite time. People get better. Some people are of the view, however, that the provision of a large-scale input of hours would be robbing other people. A special fund should be set up for that type of situation.

I ask the Minister of State to raise this issue at Cabinet. I believe there is a commitment in A Programme for a Partnership Government to review the disregard level and the means test. Nothing has been done, however. Abolishing the means test, according to the Government's own figures, would cost €1.2 billion. I got those figures last week. I know the money is not there now but in the long term, it would be money well spent. The return on that money would be absolutely phenomenal. The Minster for Public Expenditure and Reform, Deputy Donohoe, and the Secretary General of that the Department, Mr. Watt, would be delighted at the return on the investment. They are the people who seem to count.

Carer's allowance is the only means-tested welfare payment that is taxed. How is that fair? This payment should be made exempt from income tax in line with other means-tested payments. Making it subject to a tax is, in effect, adding insult to injury. The Government is taking 40%, or more, off of the top. That is madness. There are other supports that the State provides. People who are caring day in and day out need respite. This is a big issue. Those people are caring full time and only have a break when their siblings or children step in to take over for a few days. That puts a strain on the wider family.

Let us look at this from another perspective. There are plenty of people who work full time and who use up their holidays to provide relief care for their siblings or parents. This is just one example of how care work affects the lives of so many people in families. Some are struggling to earn a few bob to pay a mortgage and everything else. It is a major demand. The State can and should be doing much more to provide respite for the sake of the physical and mental health of the carers. We need to address the issue of training in a holistic way. Many carers are involved by themselves in manually lifting their loved ones in and out of beds on their own. As a barrister, I know that if someone else was doing a similar type of work, he or she would be breaching the Safety, Health and Welfare at Work (General Application) Regulations 2007. Whoever was responsible could be sued. These carers need help.

We need to revise and replace the old mobility allowance and motorised transport grant. That has been going on since 2013. As the saying goes down in Ballynacargy, a long churning makes bad butter. This is taking so long the butter must be rancid at this stage.

We need to increase funding for the housing adaptation grant. The Government has increased it but we need it more and more because our people need more appliances, mobility aids and equipment. That is essential. For every euro we spend on carers we get a huge return. The carers' associations, Family Carers Ireland and Care Alliance Ireland, say they are saving the State €10 billion. The cost of all these income support schemes is much less than that. I have said this so often; if carers were to down tools and require the State to step in with nursing homes and staff, the whole system would collapse overnight. However, carers are not asking for the State to do everything. They know that resources are limited. I was speaking to a lady this evening who knew that. They are doing most of the work without complaint. However they need the rest of society to appreciate and acknowledge their work and its social value, and ensure adequate support for them to keep going. The cost is minuscule when one carefully and objectively examines what we are getting in return.

That brings me to a crucial point. Many carers are badly stretched. Careers suffer from serious health issues themselves, including mental health issues like depression and anxiety. That is the human cost of being constantly available and on call to support somebody who needs their care, which they give with unbridled love. This is why the Labour Party believes that those in support of the carer's support grant should also receive a GP visit card. The other day somebody asked me on the radio why that should be. It is a question the Government itself will probably raise. I would simply ask, why not? Carers are not getting the card because of the means test. Some carers get the carer's support grant but not the carer's allowance. There are roughly 28,000 such people; that is what is left when roughly 80,000 are subtracted from an overall number of a little over 100,000. Giving these carers the GP visit card would recognise the impact their work has on their health. Those are small changes. The disregard could be incorporated into the budget straight away, as could the policy of extending the GP visit card to carers who are not in receipt of carer's allowance. As the motion notes, carers suffer from serious health issues including mental health issues like depression and anxiety. We need to deal with that. We need to encourage carers to look after their own health, and it makes sense to remove any cost barriers that might prevent people from going to a doctor to look after themselves.

There is a big question over the future sustainability of the whole system as it is constructed. People are working as hard as they can to look after their loved ones and in many cases, the stress and strain is intolerable. At this point carers are genuinely in crisis. We need much more detailed scrutiny and debate about the future of caring. We need a new national carers strategy. The Government is moving towards a social care model. As long as it is adequately resourced that will be fine, but I do not believe in attaching one and a half legs to a strategy that should have four. Without the other two and a half legs, the whole system will collapse. That is what is going to happen.

The strategy needs to take account of several home truths. Our population is ageing, which means that more people than ever before will be involved in care. One person in five will be involved by 2030. Families have fewer children, which means that care duties will be shared between fewer people in the family circle. The Minister of State knows this. Conditions like dementia are on the rise, which means that more challenging care situations will be common in future years. We have to take the issue of carers much more seriously than we have to date.

The Government has to open its eyes to the reality of carers' lives and the pressure they are under. I hope the Labour Party's motion tonight makes a contribution to that in a non-partisan and all-embracing way. I see that Sinn Féin has tabled an amendment with some very positive points. We have no issue with that. We all have to get behind this. It is not a partisan issue. If we do so we will be certain of success. I made this point before and the Minister of State is aware of it.

I will give one example of the means test. A woman in the audience stood up at a meeting in Mullingar, at which I spoke very passionately about the means test. We waste a lot of money on administration. Applicants must try to get through to administrators and are then put through a process. Unless there are five "severe" marks on an application form it will be refused straight away. I know that - I have been dealing with this for 30 years. I would say I have done more appeals on carer's allowance applications than anyone in this country. The person who spoke out at this meeting was a married woman with a couple of adult children in England who had come home to look after her parents. The Acting Chairman, Deputy Eugene Murphy, will vouch for this. It is not a lie. It is the blank truth. She applied for carer's allowance to look after two elderly parents, including a mother with dementia and Alzheimer's. They were in their 80s and 90s. The first thing our beloved State bureaucrats did was ask the value of her house in England. How dare they?

This woman was looking after an elderly mother and father and that is the first thing they thought of. That should be snapped out of the system. That woman left her own family in England to look after her parents and that was the first thing we did. We gave a lot of people a one-way ticket on the cattle boat from Dún Laoghaire in the 1950s, including six uncles of mine. I know a bit about this. Here was someone who had come back to look after their parents, the most precious thing she could do, and the first thing the Irish State did was poke its finger in her eye and ask how much her house was worth. A house in England could be worth £400,000. It belonged to the family. Without the disregards of €20,000, the carer's allowance was disallowed. The woman had to hire help and she went back to work to get carer's benefit. By hell, that took a stretch. It takes weeks and weeks to get something that should be received in ten days.

I am sick and tired of this. I have been at this for 22 years, since 1997. If there is one thing I would love to see, it is proper recognition of the work carers do. The basic weekly carer's allowance payment is €219. The average contribution to the fair deal scheme is €824. A hospital bed for acute care costs €6,000. Do the maths. A fool who got NG in the leaving certificate could prove that this is the most effective, cost-efficient and decent way of helping people. Let us salute the carers of Ireland. We got them on the cheap and we have exploited them. This is naked exploitation. We are an absolute disgrace as a country. I do not mind paying extra tax to make sure they get their dues. I come from a side of this House that believes that we need to levy taxes to provide services for people. Some day I will probably be in that position myself, and I hope somebody will get the carer's allowance if they need it to look after me. That is the way I think. Not everyone might think that, but the Labour Party has always thought in that way. We have sought to provide for the wider public, not for ourselves. We left the "me" to Thatcher. We always thought of the "we". I commend this motion.

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