Malcolm Byrne (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the proposal from the Minister for Social Protection to extend pension rights to family carers. I want to ensure that it is extended to foster carers. Foster carers do an incredibly important job in this State. There are about 6,000 vulnerable children and young people in care, and 90% of them are looked after and brought to realise their full potential by foster carers. One of the difficulties is that, because people make so many sacrifices in order to become foster carers, they can lose out on some of their pension entitlements. It is welcome that the Minister for Social Protection is looking to extend pension rights to family carers but I would ask that the Leader ensure it is also extended to foster families and foster parents. Perhaps we might have a debate with the Minister in this Chamber on the pension entitlements of foster carers.

I also want to express concern about the fact, and the Leader will be aware that I have raised this previously, that the bulk of the increases being given to foster carers will not come into play until next November. This is not fair when other social protection increases are coming in early in the year. It is not fair to expect foster carers to have to wait that long, particularly when we are not talking about huge sums of money and we are only talking about 5,000 individuals. I ask the Leader to please raise that with the Minister for children, Deputy O'Gorman. A broader debate on how we can support foster carers would be welcome.