Social Welfare Schemes Dail Éireann — 2023-10-24 ============================================================ Heather Humphreys (FG), Cavan-Monaghan To be clear, there is no question of anybody having his or her payment decreased. My objective here is actually to increase payments, not decrease them. This is a difficult and very sensitive area, and I reassure people that there is no intention to cut anybody's payment or to cut people off payments. That is not the intention. What I am doing is putting out very clearly in the Green Paper an opportunity to have an honest and frank discussion. I am happy to engage with the stakeholders. I have already had two meetings with them. There will be further meetings across the country. I am happy to take people's views on board. Then, when we have collated all that information, we can sit down and look at it. I have done this before with other consultations. It has worked and we have changed things. I honestly have an open mind here. I could put my head in the sand and do nothing about this - that would be the easy thing to do - but I will not do that. I want to try to make a difference and improve the situation for people with disabilities. --- 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/2023-10-24/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:52:19+00:00 Sitting date: 2023-10-24