Jen Cummins (Dublin South Central, Social Democrats)

I also welcome today's motion on carers. In fact, in the late nineties, I was a carer in London and I was a carer in Dublin when I returned after living abroad for a while. At that time, I noticed there was a significant difference in the level of training and support that carers were given by the agencies I was working for. I was happy to do that work. I was very young at the time, and it was a great introduction to being humble and being a carer for somebody else and putting their needs before mine.

Today, there are so many people in Ireland who are carers. I am thinking of the young carers we met recently in the audiovisual room and what they do in our community as they care for siblings, parents and other family members. Caring touches on every single family. Nobody will not be touched by it in the future. Some of us will need care. It is fundamental to who we are as humans that care is valued and appreciated.

This country runs on care. It is not the rhetoric of fiscal reports, budget surpluses and all those things that holds our society together, but the invisible, often unpaid, work of carers. Right now, they are exhausted, under-resourced and increasingly demoralised. The system is broken. It is one that penalises people for doing the right thing or staying home to look after a loved one, for stepping into gaps left by the State and for providing essential services that prevent hospital overcrowding and delay the need for residential care.

We in the Social Democrats have long advocated for a rights-based model of care. That means putting people first, not processes. It means making home support a legal entitlement, not a postcode lottery or a vague aspiration based on "available resources". It means finally ending the cruelty of the current means-testing regime, which also punishes low- and middle-income families for their compassion. In 2024, we saw a 7.4% increase in home support hours. However, let us not think that is brilliant - it is brilliant - without bearing in mind that there are still more than 5,500 people on waiting lists, with rural communities hardest hit.

My own mother was reliant on those services until she died last year. It was very difficult to get them.

I want to personally thank those people who cared for her and who are caring for others, those paid professionals who are like gold dust.

We have a fair deal scheme that is increasingly unfair. The financial penalty for leasing farmland because it is not deemed "actively operated" is a clear injustice to rural families, who are already doing their best to hold things together. How can we claim to value farming families while allowing these loopholes to gut intergenerational livelihoods?

As a member of the Social Democrats, I would like to see the abolition of means testing for carers, while recognising their role as essential workers in our health system; full pay parity between section 38 and section 39 workers; and a statutory timeline for the rolling out of universal home care.

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