Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

Unless it is addressed, people on disability payments or blind payments could potentially lose up to €90 of their payments. Inevitably when one is getting a higher payment as one would on the basic income, it is going to impact on other payments. However, the critical point here, as has been pointed out by the MEAI and others, including Disabled Artists and Disabled Academics, DADA, is that people with disabilities carry additional costs variously estimated, depending on levels of disability, at between €7,000 and €12,000, or an average of approximately €10,000, and there is the potential to lose their medical card. What they want is certainty that this will not be the case and that the additional money over basic social welfare payments in the new €325 payment will be available to artists with disability to channel into their art, which is the purpose of the basic income pilot, and is not gobbled up by them compensating for losses in their disability payments.

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