An tOrd Gnó - Order of Business
Dail Éireann — 2026-01-20
============================================================

Micheál Martin (FF), Cork South-Central

First of all, nothing has changed. Nothing has changed at all in respect of the tax situation governing carers. I think we need to keep everything in perspective and not create unjustified fears because I have checked this with both the Department of Finance and the Department of Social Protection. No new tax has been introduced, but what has happened on a forward-looking basis is the Department of Social Protection is providing Revenue with details of taxable carers' income in real time. About 90% of all carers are either registered already or are not liable for tax. We will obviously do everything we can because the Government, as Deputy McDonald knows, has dramatically increased the threshold for the means test income disregard. We have increased the carers' allowance by over €50.
When you compare that to Northern Ireland-----

---

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/2026-01-20/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:31+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-01-20