Séamus Brennan (Dublin South, Fianna Fail)
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The qualifying conditions for the payment of disability benefit are that a person is under 66 years of age, unfit for work due to illness and satisfies the PRSI contribution conditions. Persons over the age of 66 are not insurable under the Social Welfare Acts for disability benefit purposes and the age limit for receipt of disability benefit is 66 years. There are 62,964 persons in receipt of disability benefits.

Blind pension is payable beyond 66 years of age, when the maximum personal rate increases from €148.80 per week to a maximum rate of €166.00 per week, with increases for qualified adults and-or dependent children. There are 1,982 persons in receipt of blind pensions.

A person in receipt of a blind pension aged less than 66 years who has sufficient PRSI contributions may also be eligible to receive disability benefit, unemployment benefit, maternity benefit, adoptive benefit, or health and safety benefit. Alternatively, they may concurrently receive widow or widower's pension or one parent family payment. However, once a person reaches 66 years of age, only one payment may be made. There are 205 people in receipt of disability benefits and blind pensions, ten of whom are 65 years of age. The annual cost of extending payment of disability benefit to those recipients beyond 65 years would be approximately €90,000.

Any changes to entitlements would, however, have wider implications as there are other categories of social welfare recipients who also have entitlement to more than one income maintenance payment at any one time, including people in receipt of widow's or widower's pension and one-parent family payment. Changes to entitlements would have to be considered in the context of the wider budgetary package.

Richard Bruton (Dublin North Central, Fine Gael)
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Question 295: To ask the Minister for Social and Family Affairs when the rate of supplementary payment to pensioners who are aged 80 years or over was last increased; what the present value of that supplement would be if it have been indexed in line with the value of the contributory old age pension over the intervening period; and his views on increasing this supplement and arranging that it would be indexed in future with social welfare payments. [28081/05]

Séamus Brennan (Dublin South, Fianna Fail)
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The over-80 allowance is an additional payment of €6.40 per week made to people who are in receipt of certain social welfare type payments. At present, just over 100,000 people are receiving the allowance which was last increased in 1996.

However, for many years the policy with regard to support for pensioners has been to commit resources to improving the personal pension rates for all pensioners, rather than supplementary payments such as the over-80 allowance. In this way, resources are used to give the maximum possible benefit to all pensioners. Since 1997, the personal rate of pensions has increased by up to 81%. The increase in prices over the same period is 30.7%. Future policy in terms of allowances such as the over-80 allowance will be considered in a budgetary context.

The allowance represented about 6.6% of the personal rate for old age contributory pensioners. Had the allowance kept pace with the increase in pensions since then it would now be worth approximately €12 per week.