Garret Ahearn (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank my colleague, Senator Seery Kearney, for the amount of work that she has put into this motion, and thank all of my Fine Gael colleagues for bringing this forward. I welcome the Minister of State to the Chamber. If it is not too remiss of me, I thank him for the work that he did last week on minimum pricing and for the lives that the country will save, on the back of that, in the next number of years.

I welcome the opportunity to speak on this motion. On Friday, I had the opportunity to meet Clare Duffy, Family Carers Ireland and a person that the Acting Chairperson knows quite well, Councillor Richie Molloy in Clonmel who does an awful lot of work for family carers. I had a very good discussion with them on the range of issues for carers that need to be priorities, albeit they recognise the progress that has been made already and the commitments that are being made in the programme for Government going forward. However, although it has been a difficult year, there is worry about the follow through on those commitments in the lifetime of this Government. If we are going to do so then there are 20 or 30 actions in the programme for Government that we have committed to, and we really need to get moving on a lot of them.

One of the issues that is a huge concern for Family Carers Ireland is the carer's guarantee. Last year, the €2 million that was committed to carers in the budget was welcomed but the problem is that the money did not go directly to family carers and went straight to the HSE service plan, which has happened in other areas of health. It has happened with mental health services over the last number of years, where money was not directly given to service providers. That is an issue because transparency is very important. In terms of family carers, there is only one group - Family Carers Ireland - but there is a range of groups involved in mental health services and they get State support. Family Carers Ireland asked for €3.2 million but, subsequently, with the onset of Covid, it needs €5 million a year. If we give the financial commitment directly to Family Carers Ireland the transparency in how it is spent is clear. If there is one issue that Family Carers Ireland would want to raise, it is that we would give it money directly so that the money is used directly and there is more transparency in how the money is spent.

A number of people have spoken about the means test for the carer's allowance. I cannot think of any other sector where means testing or thresholds have not been moved since 2008. Almost 90,000 people receive a carer's allowance. As Senator Pauline O'Reilly said in her contribution, only about 50% of them, or between 40,000 and 44,000 carers, receive the full amount of the allowance. If one has a household income of over €62,000 a year then one only gets €5 a week to be a carer. Everything in the Sláintecare plan on the future of healthcare is about encouraging home care. If one gives a household that has an income of €62,000 a year €5 a week then that is hardly a commitment that supports home care. As so many Senators have said before me, it is a no-brainer. It makes more sense financially to have people at home. They want to be at home. It is cheaper to have them at home but we must be realistic in the supports that we give. I cannot think of any other area of Government expenditure where since the crash of 2008 expenditure has decreased. In 2008, the carer's allowance was €221 per week and now it is €219. We have increased funding in so many other areas and need to look at that constructively.

We need a dedicated carer's pension for lifetime carers so for people who have been full-time carers for over 30 years. There has been really good feedback and engagement from carers and a commitment needs to be made now, which would be great from the perspective of carers.

Senator Joe O'Reilly spoke about supports for people not living in Ireland who might come home to care for someone. They might come home from the UK, Australia or Canada and want to care for a family member but the supports are not there for them. It is probably a change that we need to make in EU law rather than Irish law.I certainly think that if the many people who moved abroad in the past ten years need to come home to care for a family member, supports need to be there for them.

In my own portfolio on enterprise and trade, our committee was discussing work permits a number of weeks ago. When we speak about that, we normally touch on people who are working as fruit pickers or elsewhere in the agricultural industry. However, I believe we can accommodate homecare workers as part of that. If we move forward with Sláintecare, we are going to have more people working from home. A recent ESRI study suggested it expects a tripling of the number of people who will need care, and that is just for older people. If we are looking to support that sector, we need to figure out how to staff it.

The real takeaways that Family Carers Ireland want are the carer’s guarantee and to make sure that if we are going to make a commitment to fund family carers, it is given to them directly. How it was done in the last budget is not funding the sector directly. If we are going to do it, we need to do it directly.