Social Welfare Payments
Dail Éireann — 2026-02-26
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Séamus McGrath (FF), Cork South-Central

As I outlined earlier, the difference between a couple, for example, on social welfare and an individual can be over €300 of a difference per week. That is very significant. When we look at the advocacy groups, such as Alone, which is advocating on behalf of older people, they indicate that over 100,000 people are potentially in poverty. The vast majority of those would be individuals living alone. Again, the living alone allowance is designed to help support those. I welcome it but, again, I am reiterating the point that it does need to be increased. On any objective analysis, €22 is not sufficient to make up that difference. As I said, many of the household costs are not related to the number of people in the property. As a constituency TD, similar to the Minister, many of the requests we get are from people living alone in terms of the difficulties they face in meeting daily costs and running a household. I appreciate the Minister's response. Again, I would urge him to strongly consider this at an early stage.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-02-26/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:42+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-02-26