Paul Gavan (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister. It is nice to see her. I begin by wishing her well on her planned retirement. I congratulate her on her career in politics. At least she gets to plan her retirement. Some of us may have unplanned retirements in a few weeks' time. We wish the Minister well.

I will touch on a couple points and I will not take up too much time. As Senator Craughwell said, it is not ideal to be dealing with a Bill like this in one afternoon. There are many points I am sure many of us want to make, so I will leave most of my points for the amendments we put down on Committee Stage.

We will support the Bill.There are many welcome points in it but we do have suggestions that we think would make the Bill better and we ask the Minister to consider them, even at this late stage. I will only touch on a couple. The first is something Senator Wall referred to which I have also come across, namely fuel allowance where adult children move back in with their parents and their parents lose out. The statistics are quite frightening. The Minister is probably aware that some seven out of ten adult children between the ages of 18 and 33 years are now living at home with their parents. That is something that never happened before and it is a reflection of the housing crisis for sure where people are trying to save money at home in order to get a home. I do not think parents should be penalised in that respect. It is something that is coming up fairly regularly when I meet people in Limerick. I ask that the Minister take a further look at that as it looks very unfair.

There is another issue on which my party has been very clear. The means test for carers needs to be abolished. It is as simple as that. It is entirely unfair. We think the Minister could have done that in this budget. There is another issue that I will raise in the amendments. The income disregards that the Minister has approved are being held off until July 2025. We cannot understand why they could not come in on 1 January. Family Carers Ireland understands from its engagement with the Department that its systems have been updated and the new disregards can easily be integrated so it is not clear why carers must wait 10 months for the new disregards to take effect. I would welcome a response on that.

My final point is one that is close to my heart. The Minister will be aware that we have proposed in last number of budgets the introduction of a parental bereavement and leave benefit of two weeks. The trauma of anyone losing a child is horrendous and, generally, people effectively have to go back to work after three days. We really need to look at that as an issue. We can certainly afford to do so. We propose leave of two weeks and we have proposed that for the past three years. I am told that the Minister has not generally commented on our proposal to date. She might do so this afternoon. I think it is a very worthwhile proposal and one which would have broad cross-party support.

Otherwise, I am quite content to raise the issues via the amendments I have tabled. I am conscious that we have less than a couple of hours left to deal with all of those. I wish the Minister well and thank her.