Social Welfare Rates Dail Éireann — 2026-06-18 ============================================================ Dara Calleary (FF), Mayo I was wondering there, Deputy. I want to focus this year on targeted interventions to address those particular cohorts of people who are most at risk of falling into poverty. I want a situation where we can iron out rules within the systems that may be doing that inadvertently and may be driving people in that direction. As I said earlier, there is the situation of somebody who loses their spouse or partner and is immediately faced with the same bills but with half the income. We need to work better in terms of making the living alone allowance available quicker and providing information on it. There is also the fuel allowance. I am also conscious we have not increased the living alone allowance since budget 2022, so we have some way to catch up there. The Deputy and Deputy Séamus McGrath in particular have been consistent in their work on this and I look forward to all colleagues providing input on this because it is something we all get in our constituency clinics on this particular payment. --- 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/2026-06-18/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-27T06:54:51+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-06-18