Denis Naughten (Roscommon-Galway, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I congratulate the Minister on becoming a granny again - Granny Heather - to little Charlotte who was born earlier today as she got up to speak. She is a sister for little Arthur as well. I promise the Minister that all of us here in the House will ensure the very expeditious passage of this legislation so she can spend more time babysitting over the Christmas period.

A year has now passed since this House unanimously supported a motion to extend special support for all front-line workers suffering from long Covid, and a year has passed since the Minister promised to look into the plight of such workers. However, we are still no further along and those commitments remain unfulfilled. I reiterate the urgency of this matter and call for immediate action from our Government to address this issue. As the Minister will be aware, the Department of Health and the HSE have agreed to extend special payments for a period exceeding 28 months to 143 healthcare staff afflicted with long Covid symptoms. The State has, therefore, acknowledged that these 143 healthcare staff have an occupational illness of long Covid after contracting it, in all probability, within their place of employment. However, they are still being denied access to an occupational illness scheme because the State is still refusing to publicly acknowledge that staff are chronically ill as a result of Covid infection.

What will happen on 1 April when these staff are unfit to return to work, particularly when their employer had sought a 12-month extension of those support payments to November 2022? What about the staff who have been excluded from these supports? Every other front-line worker outside of the health service who is out with a chronic illness as a result of long Covid is getting no additional occupational support. Those within the health service who were infected since November 2021 during the height of the Omicron variant are unjustly being excluded from the support the 143 workers are receiving. We asked these individuals who run our hospitals and supermarkets and who support people with disabilities to go out and roll up their sleeves in the interests of the country at the height of the pandemic. These dedicated individuals, who contracted long Covid as a direct result of their heroic efforts during the pandemic, are now being denied the support they rightfully deserve.

We are now turning our backs on them and that is neither fair nor right.

We must treat all workers equally and to do so, we need long Covid to be designated an occupational illness for all front-line workers who contracted the virus during their employment. On Committee Stage, I and Deputy Berry will be bringing forward an amendment to try to progress that. We need long Covid to be designated an occupational illness. Many of these workers have incurred significant financial costs in managing their illnesses without any State support. That has also impacted the labour force, with many patients, often young and previously healthy, experiencing prolonged multi-system symptoms that are impacting their daily lives and their ability to work. Some of them are only working on a part-time basis. We need to address this issue.

I welcome the changes the Minister has introduced for family carer's pensions. I acknowledge the work the Minister has done in that regard. Not only will the changes apply to those who will be of pensionable age after 1 January next but they will also apply to existing pensioners who were providing long-term care until they reached 66 years of age. That is a significant acknowledgement of their role and I thank the Minister for her work in this area. I thank her not only for her work on carer's pensions but also on all of the other measures on which she has been working with committee members. We have, over the term of this Dáil, done a significant amount of heavy lifting to improve the plight of carers.

I will ask the Minister to look at one further measure to which I know she is personally committed. It is the means test for the carer's allowance. On 18 May 2022, Ms Anna Budayova, Ms Niamh Ryan and Mr. Damien Douglas were before our committee. They gave us powerful evidence about the challenges they are dealing with to provide full-time care to their disabled children. They spoke about the impact of the carer's allowance means test and its impact on them, their families and their caring roles. We need to work towards a financial system for family carers that is designed around the care that is given and not how much is in the bank account of the husband or wife of the full-time carer. Currently, the eligibility test for this payment is little more than a mean test, denying people financial assistance to support them in providing vital services in our society today.

As the Minister knows, Family Carers Ireland, in conjunction with Maynooth University, has put forward a proposal for a participatory income for family carers. The report it has produced recommends a move away from the means-tested approach to the carer's allowance to a focus on the need for caring and the provision of full-time care as the criteria for the provision of a carer's support payment. This study envisages the introduction of a payment for carers that is not means tested from 2027 onwards. In the short term, we need an implementation group within the Cabinet subcommittee on social inclusion that would look, first of all, at the existing and future processes of administrating care payments and, second, at the methods of proving eligibility for such a support payment. I ask the Minister to engage with her colleagues in Cabinet about moving that process along and establishing that subcommittee within Cabinet to progress it.

I also ask the Minister to look at an anomaly within the social welfare code. My solution will not cost anything but will help to streamline the code. All of us are trying to end up in a situation where we make it as easy as possible for people to transition from welfare into work. Many of those people will transition on a part-time basis first and then on a full-time basis. If I asked the Minister which is the first day of the week, we could argue about whether it is Monday or Sunday. According to the social welfare code, the first day of the week is Wednesday. That is the case for people in receipt of jobseeker's allowance. The Minister's officials will be able to tell her which is the first day of the week for those in receipt of jobseeker's benefit. The week actually starts on Wednesday and goes through the weekend. Of course, Sunday is either included or excluded depending on whether the applicant works on that day or not. That adds to confusion. It is a bureaucratic barrier to people taking up part-time employment.

There is an historical basis for this. It is based on when the payment is issued for the different social welfare payments. In this day and age, if we are trying to encourage people to transition from welfare into work, we should have a standard working week from Monday to Friday or Monday to Saturday, regardless of which social welfare payment someone is in receipt of. That would make things much clearer for people and would ensure they do not get caught in loopholes and anomalies, end up with penalties or lose payments. It would act as a simple additional incentive to work. I ask the Minister to consider that. I commend the Bill to the House.

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