An tOrd Gnó - Order of Business
Dail Éireann — 2023-10-03
============================================================

Violet-Anne Wynne (IND), Clare

In the shadow of the looming budget, I refer to the importance of putting carers at the heart of it. As the Taoiseach knows, family carers save the State approximately €20 billion a year, which is the equivalent of a second HSE. In my constituency of Clare, some 6% of the population, or more than 8,200 people, provide unpaid care. In addition, the number of Clare people providing over 43 hours of unpaid care a week more than doubled in the last census. These are good people providing round-the-clock care to friends and family members. I encourage the Taoiseach to use budget 2024 to introduce a suite of meaningful measures to assist carers, such as phasing out the means test, extending eligibility for the fuel allowance, introducing a statutory disregard for carers on local authority rents and increasing payments. I ask that carers not be left out in the cold in budget 2024. They are the backbone of this country.

---

Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2023-10-03/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:52:13+00:00
Sitting date: 2023-10-03