Peter Roche (Galway East, Fine Gael)

I fully accept that cases have to be assessed and the criteria are strict. The cases that I mentioned, as I said, involve only a small of people who have come to my constituency office who would fall into that category where they are full time.

In fact, in order to come to the constituency office, they would sometimes have to get somebody to stand in and do the caring while they were absent from the house. That will tell the Minister the level of necessity there is and the requirement there would be for the Department and the Minister to be more compassionate in terms of the way we would deal with cases like that.

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