Care Services
Dail Éireann — 2025-09-23
============================================================

Mark Wall (LAB), Kildare South

I appreciate the Minister's reply. As I said in my introduction, we are all aware of the great work of family carers, what they do for the State and the €20 billion they save the State every year. However, as the Minister said in her reply, they need a break, something we all can agree on. Today I attended the family carers' pre-budget presentation. One of the issues for the people they represent is that respite care is not strong enough in many places. I appreciate, as outlined in the Minister's reply, that this is also cross-departmental, but from the point of view of the Minister for children and disability, a huge cohort of family carers who are caring for those with a disability need respite care. They are caring 24-7 and are crying out for some sort of respite. The Minister and her Department need to ensure that they get the respite they fully deserve.

---

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/2025-09-23/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-09-14T01:00:59+00:00
Sitting date: 2025-09-23