Social Welfare Benefits
Dail Éireann — 2026-01-15
============================================================

Erin McGreehan (FF), Louth

We all will herald in the success of that cost-of-disability payment and want that payment to come through. The Minister articulated clearly the increases that have been put forward but there are so many people who are the working poor and who do not qualify for so many of those grants. Whether it is lower employment rates or lower income rates, or higher costs of living for people who need extra heat, who cannot travel work or for whom there is a lack of access to transport, there are extra charges on those people and their households. There are so many working poor but there are far more working poor people with disabilities. I want to make sure the cost-of-disability payment takes into account the thousands of people with disabilities in this country who are working, continue to be poor and caught in that poverty trap of not getting access to benefits and the costs still being there for them.

---

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/2026-01-15/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:30+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-01-15