Departmental Programmes
Dail Éireann — 2025-11-26
============================================================

Paul Murphy (PBP), Dublin South-West

The budget was a savage attack on disabled people. It took over €1,000 out of the pockets of disabled people and betrayed the promise in the programme for Government to introduce a permanent annual cost-of-disability support payment. The last time I asked about this, the Taoiseach claimed the cost of disability would be looked at in the next budget. The cost-of-living crisis is now. The cost-of-disability crisis is now. Some 70,000 people who are disabled or have a long-term illness are living in poverty. That is one in three. I have been inundated with emails from disabled people asking for winter cost-of-living and cost-of-disability payment. Many will be forced to choose between heating and eating this Christmas. They also want a permanent cost-of-disability payment without further delay. The Taoiseach has billions of euro in surplus. Do not be a Scrooge this Christmas. Please act on it.

---

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/2025-11-26/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:22+00:00
Sitting date: 2025-11-26