Heather Humphreys (Cavan-Monaghan, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The Government acknowledges the valuable role family carers play and is fully committed to supporting carers in that role. This commitment is recognised in both the programme for Government and the national carers’ strategy. My Department provides a comprehensive package of carers’ income supports including carer’s allowance, carer’s benefit, domiciliary care allowance and the carer’s support grant. Combined spending on all these payments to carers in 2024 is expected to exceed €1.7 billion. The carer’s allowance is a means-tested social assistance income support paid to carers who are caring for people who require full-time care and attention. The means test is used to target the support at those most in need. There are currently 97,407 people in receipt of this payment. The person being cared for must be so incapacitated as to require full-time care and attention and be likely to require this full-time care and attention for at least 12 months. The time spent providing care must not be less than 35 hours per week. However, the carer payments provide flexibility in allowing carers to engage in training, education or work of up to 18.5 hours per week. In effect, a carer can engage in these activities for half of a full-time working week. During this time, adequate provision must be made for the care of the relevant person. Both the full-time care and attention requirement and the 18.5 hour-limitation are contained in the respective legislative provisions of the carer’s allowance, carer’s benefit and the carer’s support grant schemes. I consider the limit of 18.5 hours to represent a reasonable balance between meeting the care recipient's requirement for full-time care and the carer's need to maintain contact with the workforce. Any proposal for further changes to this condition would need to maintain this balance and would have to be considered in a policy and budgetary context.

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