Ceisteanna ó Cheannairí - Leaders' Questions
Dail Éireann — 2026-01-28
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Micheál Martin (FF), Cork South-Central

First of all, the Government did discontinue the specific measures that we had introduced for the previous two years to deal with inflation across the board. It was not any one particular sector. The Deputy continually and disingenuously narrows it down and say we made cuts. We got rid of the one-off payments. They were not fiscally sustainable and they are not fiscally sustainable. That is the bottom line here and we need to be honest and real about it. I know those in opposition will not be because they will always come back and say we could provide another €100 million here or €500 million there. Having once-off payments is not a sustainable way to deal with these issues.
However, we did take measures in the budget to support people with disabilities, which the Deputy has ignored, because the budget is not just about payments in themselves. Across all five pillars of the strategy, supporting disabled people at every stage of life, we took measures. The cost of disability is one of those and we will deal with that comprehensively in the next budget. We delivered a record 20% increase in disability funding because supporting disabilities is about investment in services. It is about practical supports. It is about opportunities in education, opportunities in employment and opportunities in community participation. That investment in services is vital and needs to happen on a sustained basis, so we put it permanently into the budget - not once-off, but permanently into the budget for the long haul in respect of improving services in all those aspects of life for people with a disability.
We have to strengthen mainstream public support and measures for households impacted by disability on a sustainable basis. We increased the core rate of social welfare payments by €10, bringing personal rates to €254. We increased domiciliary care allowance by €20 monthly. We increased the earnings disregard for the carer's allowance to €1,000 per single person and €2,000 for a couple. The analysis by the ESRI and the Department of Finance confirms the positive impact of these decisions. It concludes that the at-risk-of-poverty rate across the population falls by 1.7%, with the largest reductions for older people, a fall of 6.2%, and for the population affected by disability, a fall of 3.8%. Those are not my figures; they come from the ESRI and the Department of Finance.
On the cost-of-disability payment, the Minister is consulting. He wants to do it properly and on a sustainable basis and he is working on that. This is a five-year Government. We committed to this and we are going to do it. We are going to do it in a proper structured way and not with a once-off measure or anything like that. It has to be done that way. This is not simple either and let us not pretend it is. This has to be done properly and that is what the Minister is going to do. He was referring to political commentary, not commentary from representative organisations. The Deputy should not deliberately misrepresent in that way.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-01-28/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:34+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-01-28