John Dolan (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State, Deputy Finian McGrath, and his officials. This is a good day in terms of giving much needed support and respite to people and families. It also has great benefit for the person who is being cared for, because the burden that is on their loved one weighs heavily on the person who is being cared for. That is also to be acknowledged today.

I want to go back to a very useful document, namely, the Bills Digest written by Diarmaid O'Sullivan, which includes the policy background. The documents notes that the "Prime Time - Carers In Crisis" special in December and the work by Rosita Boland in The Irish Timeshighlighted issues, including insufficient respite care, insufficient home care, dealing with challenging behaviour, which is one to let our minds rest on for a while, the detrimental impact of caring on carers' mental and physical health and concerns about what will happen to those cared for when the carer passes away.

We are making an important step today, but it is important to contextualise it in what still needs to be done. A Programme for A Partnership Government states:

Carers are the backbone of care provision in this country. In 2012, the first ever Carer's Strategy was published. We are committed to implementing it in full. We wish to see greater involvement of family carers in the preparation of care plans, aiding the provision of care, together with more accessible training and respite care, to facilitate full support. We also support an increase in Carer's Allowance and Carer's Benefit as well as improved access to counselling supports for carers.

I want to draw a relationship between this statement in 2016 and the fact, it would seem, that a "Prime Time" programme delving into the crisis was what spurred this very welcome move. Perhaps that is not the case, but it is the way it looks. We have seen issues that have come into the public domain where families have made their personal situation public and where there has been a response. I simply want to say that if there is no correlation between one thing and the other, the Government really needs to come out and show this is the case. For a lot of people, there is still a sense that things will get responded to in some way when people are out there in the media, and that is not helpful.

We all know Family Carers Ireland, which was the Carers Association. We have all benefitted not just from its advocacy work but the very practical work it does in every parish and townland in the country keeping people and their situations together. One of the key issues it has, while welcoming the Bill and recognising it as a positive step, is that it is very frustrated at the decision to limit the card to carers in receipt of carer's allowance. This imposes a means test by virtue of the fact the carer's allowance is means tested. As such, this decision is at odds with the Government's commitment to introduce universal free GP access to all ages. This means that while children under the age of six and those aged over 70 are granted a GP visit card regardless of their means, carers are treated differently. This point has already been made by Senator Rónán Mullen and others.

I want to focus for a moment on people who receive the carer's support grant. They are often what might be described as the squeezed middle. They do not meet the means test. In Diarmaid O'Sullivan's work we see that the majority of carers are women and most of them are between 40 and 60 years of age. They are significant years, particularly for women but for adults in general. They are looking over their shoulder in terms of children and family development and looking at ageing parents. It is something that needs to be taken account of.

There is also the issue of the number of years that some people spend caring. For some it is a two, three or five year stretch and for others it can start in their 20s or 30s. I know the Minister of State is live to this issue, and it comes back to the idea of families being squeezed. Many of the people being cared for need their houses adapted in some way or other. We are not dealing with that today, but the housing adaptation grant is highly means tested. If people have reasonable, but not great, means it is another thing they cannot get their hands on too easily. There are issues that relate to the carer's support grant. Often, one of the adults in the house has already had to give up work and forgo significant income that would help that household. These are people of working age. There is a squeezed group of people who do not meet the means test but who are really under pressure. Having said that, I am very happy to see this and I welcome it very strongly.