Results 321-340 of 16,691 for speaker:Dara Calleary

Written Answers — Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection: Social Welfare Benefits (25 Sep 2025)

Dara Calleary: The Free Travel scheme provides free travel on the main public transport services and and on private transport services operating the Free Travel scheme. There are over 1.1 million customers with direct eligibility for Free Travel. As part of Budget 2024, Free Travel was extended to people who are medically certified as unfit to drive. From 29th July 2024, the measure extended access...

Written Answers — Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection: Employment Support Services (25 Sep 2025)

Dara Calleary: The Government is very aware of the difficulties that disabled people can face in entering and retaining employment. My Department provides a range of employment supports for disabled people in that regard. My Department's Intreo service is a single point of contact for all employment and income supports in the State. Disabled people can access mainstream employment schemes such as...

Written Answers — Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection: School Meals Programme (25 Sep 2025)

Dara Calleary: The Nutritional Standards for School Meals have been in place since the scheme's inception and were developed by a technical Nutrition Subgroups comprised of:Dieticians from the Irish Nutrition and Dietetic Institute of Ireland,The HSE,Safefood, andThe Food Safety Authority of Ireland.These standards are available to all schools, organisations and suppliers and are publicly available on...

Written Answers — Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection: Departmental Schemes (25 Sep 2025)

Dara Calleary: The Department offers a range of employment schemes and other supports to encourage long-term unemployed people to return to work, while also assisting communities across the country in the provision of vital services. They are targeted at people who have been on an unemployment payment or certain other social welfare payments for a specific period of time. Community Employment (CE) and...

Written Answers — Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection: Social Welfare Benefits (25 Sep 2025)

Dara Calleary: My Department is committed to providing a quality service to all its customers. This includes ensuring that applications are processed and that decisions on entitlement are made as quickly as possible. Processing times vary across schemes, depending on the differing eligibility criteria. Schemes that require a high level of documentary evidence from the customer, particularly in the case of...

Written Answers — Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection: Social Welfare Fraud (25 Sep 2025)

Dara Calleary: The Department’s Compliance and Anti Fraud Strategy sets out a range of measures designed to prevent and detect fraud, ensure effective oversight of schemes, recover any overpayments identified and to pursue the prosecution of offenders where appropriate. Where suspected fraudulent activity is identified, each individual case is examined and the Department then decides on the most...

Written Answers — Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection: Employment Support Services (25 Sep 2025)

Dara Calleary: My Department provides a range of employment supports to facilitate access to the workplace for disabled people. My Department's Intreo service is a single point of contact for all employment and income supports in the State. Disabled people can access mainstream employment schemes such as Community Employment and Tús as well as referral to tailored supports such as Employability....

Written Answers — Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection: State Pensions (25 Sep 2025)

Dara Calleary: Carer's Allowance is the main income support scheme for family carers in the community. Under the one payment per person rule, people eligible for multiple social welfare payments typically receive the higher of the available options. This reflects the fact that payments are intended as an income support that arises due to a specified contingency that eliminates or significantly restricts a...

Written Answers — Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection: Social Welfare Benefits (25 Sep 2025)

Dara Calleary: Domiciliary Care Allowance is a monthly non-means tested payment to a parent or guardian for a child aged up to 16 who has a severe disability. The child must require care and attention substantially over and above that required by other children their age. Eligibility is not based on the disability or diagnosis, but rather on the impact of the disability in terms of the level of care and...

Written Answers — Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection: Social Welfare Benefits (25 Sep 2025)

Dara Calleary: I propose to take Questions Nos. 120, 123 and 167 together. The Programme for Government has clearly set out a timeline which commits to significantly increasing the income disregards for Carer’s Allowance in each Budget with a view to phasing out the means test during the lifetime of the Government. This is a major change to the Carer's Allowance scheme and to the Irish...

Written Answers — Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection: Social Welfare Code (25 Sep 2025)

Dara Calleary: Self-employed contributors pay class S PRSI at a rate of 4.1%. This is 11.15 percentage points lower than the combined employer and employee contribution of 15.25% made in respect of employed contributors. However, self-employed contributors do have access to over 90% of benefits available to employed contributors. The cost of extending illness benefit to the self-employed was considered...

Written Answers — Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection: Community Employment Schemes (25 Sep 2025)

Dara Calleary: Tús is a community work placement programme which aims to provide short-term work opportunities for those who are unemployed for more than a year. Tús is focused on jobseekers that are unemployed for twelve months or more with the targeted activation of this cohort aiming to provide additional assistance and a renewed impetus to these jobseekers who could otherwise be in danger of...

Written Answers — Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection: State Pensions (25 Sep 2025)

Dara Calleary: The State Pension (Non-Contributory) is a means-tested social assistance payment for people aged 66 and over, habitually residing in the State, who do not qualify for a State Pension (Contributory), or who only qualify for a reduced rate contributory pension based on their social insurance record. My Department has over 90 schemes of which a significant number are means-tested schemes,...

Written Answers — Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection: Social Welfare Code (25 Sep 2025)

Dara Calleary: The Roadmap for Social Inclusion 2020-2025 contains a commitment to "Consider and prepare a report for Government on the potential application of the benchmarking approach to other welfare payments". The roadmap also includes a commitment to develop a benchmarking approach for use in adjusting the value of State pension payments. It is worth noting that indexing weekly social protection...

Written Answers — Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection: State Pensions (25 Sep 2025)

Dara Calleary: Means testing payments ensures that the State’s limited resources are directed towards those who are in the most need of financial support. The means test examines cash income (including income from work) and capital (savings and investments), as well as property that someone does not personally use. The house in which a customer resides – their principal residence or home -...

Written Answers — Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection: Poverty Data (25 Sep 2025)

Dara Calleary: The increases in consistent poverty rates, as reported in March 2025 by the Central Statistics Office in its Survey on Income and Living Conditions 2025, are disappointing and reinforce the need for targeted supports to those most in need. It is also important to recognise that the CSO data is based on data collected in 2023 and therefore does not reflect the Government’s full...

Written Answers — Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection: Child Poverty (25 Sep 2025)

Dara Calleary: Reducing child poverty is a key commitment of this Government. Based on this commitment, on 10th September last, the Government agreed a new Child Poverty Target of 3% or less, based on consistent poverty, to be achieved by the end of 2030. This new Target will guide our cross-Government focus to reduce child poverty and ensure investment is targeted at children who need it the most....

Written Answers — Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection: Social Welfare Benefits (25 Sep 2025)

Dara Calleary: The Household Benefits Package (HBP) comprises of the electricity or gas allowance, and the free television licence. The package is generally available to people living in the State aged 66 years or over who are in receipt of a social welfare type payment or who satisfy a means test. The package is also available to some people under the age of 66, who are in receipt of certain welfare type...

Written Answers — Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection: Social Welfare Eligibility (25 Sep 2025)

Dara Calleary: Illness benefit is the primary short term income support provided by my Department to those who are unable to work due to illness of any type and who are covered by social insurance. Eligibility for illness benefit depends on the person’s PRSI record and class. The person must have made the required number of contributions under class A, E, H or P to qualify. In general,...

Written Answers — Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection: Child Poverty (25 Sep 2025)

Dara Calleary: The poverty data used by my Department is the official poverty data published annually by the Central Statistics Office (CSO) in the Survey on Income and Living Conditions (SILC). It is important to note that until the release of the SILC in March 2025, consistent poverty in children had been on a downward trend, peaking in 2013 at 12.7% and falling to its lowest level in 2023 at 4.8%,...