Social Welfare Benefits Dail Éireann — 2026-06-18 ============================================================ Colm Burke (FG), Cork North-Central I very much welcome the reply. The changes that are coming into effect on 1 July are very good. There are a huge number of people who provide a good standard of care in the home rather than people having to go into full-time residential care in nursing homes. They are providing an invaluable service. It is important that we make sure that we tick all the boxes and that they are discouraged from continuing to provide that care because they qualify for the allowance but they are afraid of applying for it as they are afraid of losing their medical card. That is an issue that we need to get clarification on. Again, I thank the Minister for the work that has been done in this area and the number of additional people who are now going to come in under the qualifying criteria, so they can get the carer's allowance in support of the work that they are doing. --- 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