Grant Payments Seanad Éireann — 2026-06-25 ============================================================ Gareth Scahill (FG), Nominated by the Taoiseach I welcome the Minister of State and thank him for taking this matter. I want to begin by recognising the significant progress that has been made with the housing adaptation grant scheme. The publication of the 2024 review led to real, meaningful reform, and I welcome the fact that many of the recommendations have been implemented from that review. The increase of more than 30% in the grant limits, the increase in the income thresholds, the reduction in the local authority contribution from 20% to 15% and the changes to the means test have made a real difference to older people and people with disabilities. They demonstrate the Government's commitment to supporting independent living. This scheme really does change lives. It allows people to remain in their homes that they have built up and built their lives in. It gives people with disabilities greater independence and dignity. It also makes good economic sense. Every adaptation that keeps somebody safely at home reduces pressure on our hospitals and our long-term residential care. As the review recognises, supporting people to age at home is better for families and communities. It is also better value for the State. While we have improved the scheme, there is now an opportunity to make it more responsive to the realities people are facing today. Recently an elderly lady contacted me. She lives alone and relies completely on a stairlift because she cannot safely use the stairs. Her home cannot be adapted to have a downstairs bedroom or bathroom. Her concern is very simple and very real. I have raised this before and the Minister of State will be familiar with it. We suffer a lot of power outages and her stairlift is badly affected during them, so she is effectively trapped between floors when her stairlift goes out. I tried to find a practical solution, such as a battery back-up or another assistive technology, but there appears to be no mechanism within the current schemes to support this type of adaptation. In 2024, the review specifically recommended updating guidance on assistive technologies to reflect the rapidly evolving nature of these products. Will the Department now consider expanding the range of eligible works to include modern assistive technologies that improve safety, resilience and independent living? I also want to raise another case. A family seeking an accessible extension for their child in a wheelchair with a disability had their application refused following a means test assessment,. The review in 2024 rightly recognised that assessed income based solely on the previous tax year can create an unfair outcome, and recommended the annualisation of in-year earnings based on the previous 13 weeks in certain circumstances. However, families continue to find themselves excluded in the context of changes in income relating to someone other than the main applicant. In this case, it was the applicant's child who they were trying to find. The child needs this adaptation and I would ask whether local authorities can apply more discretion in evaluating these cases. Is there scope to review how these provisions operate in practice, to ensure that deserving families are not unintentionally excluded? While funding for 2026 has increased to over €152 million, enough to fund an estimated 17,000 grants, we already know that several local authorities in the month of June have had to close or restrict applications because their allocations are already exhausted. Without national data on applications, waiting lists or priority categories, it is impossible to know whether funding is truly keeping pace with demand. I support the recommendation by Alone, who were in the audiovisual room yesterday, that this information should be collected and published nationally. Better data will lead to better budgeting, fairer allocations and year-round access to these vital grants. This is an excellent scheme. It is improving lives every day. My request is not simply for more funding, but for it to develop as a scheme that keeps pace with technology, reflects real family circumstances and is informed by robust national data. --- 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/seanad/2026-06-25/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:55:07+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-06-25