Disability Services
Dail Éireann — 2026-04-21
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Rose Conway-Walsh (SF), Mayo

Budget 2026 unforgivably made some people in receipt of disability payments up to €1,400 worse off. People with disabilities want to contribute to society and want jobs in their communities. They have the same ambitions in life as everybody else. Ireland has one of the lowest disability employment rates in the EU, at between 32% and 33%. That is nearly 20 percentage points below the EU average. The wage subsidy scheme, which financially supports employers who employ people with disabilities, has facilitated the participation of many disabled people in the workforce. However, disabled entrepreneurs are excluded. Therefore, employers are financially supported to hire disabled people but disabled people are not supported to employ themselves. As the Taoiseach's Government has said that it will prioritise disability, will he examine how the wage subsidy scheme can be expanded to include disabled entrepreneurs?

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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/2026-04-21/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-09-21T01:01:08+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-04-21