Social Welfare, Civil Registration and Charities (Amendment) Bill 2026: Second Stage Dail Éireann — 2026-09-22 ============================================================ Mark Ward (SF), Dublin Mid-West The majority of the provisions in this Bill are procedural, and, as Deputy O'Reilly said already, we will not oppose them. However, section 8 of this Bill must be removed. It must be made explicitly clear that a person should have access to any service available without using a public services card other than the Department of Social Protection. This must reflect the current legal position arising from the agreement between the Data Protection Commission and the Department of Social Protection. If enacted, section 8 would lead to the public services card becoming a de facto general-purpose ID card. The Government is making the public services card mandatory by stealth. I will give the Minister a personal example. My driver's licence was up for renewal. I applied to have it renewed but I could not without a public services card because I had changed address recently. I had not got a public services card, I never had a need for a public services card and I never had any interest in obtaining one but because you cannot renew your licence or learner permit online without a public services card, and because I needed a change of address, I had no choice but to apply for a public services card. I have one in my wallet as we speak. There was no other way to resolve this issue without my getting a public services card, so in this instance it was mandatory. As I said, the only voluntary part of this was for me to not drive any more. I need a licence. There are other cases, as has been raised already. If you are over 65 years of age, you cannot access free travel without a public services card. The Minister said in his opening remarks that the use of the public services card was voluntary but that is not voluntary to my mind. If over-65s want to access free travel, they have to have public services cards, and I just spoke about how I needed it to renew my driver licence. For me, that was mandatory. Turning to section 10, I tabled a number of questions to the Minister for oral answer. They were not chosen, so I will bring them up here instead, as they are loosely related to section 10, which relates to the Chief Appeals Officer. I hope that will lead to quicker decisions being made. That needs to be done. I want to raise the issue of appeals when things fall through the cracks. The Department of Social Protection is using GoFundMe-type fundraisers to deny people exceptional needs payments. I had a case recently when a single mother passed away, leaving a young family. Most of them are under the age of 18 and it will mostly be left to the oldest daughter to take over their guardianship. The community has rallied around this young family in these tragic circumstances, which is welcome, and it did a GoFundMe to deal with costs that might occur down the line. It raised a moderate amount, not a huge amount. One of the children, who at the time was a young adult, applied for an exceptional needs payment to cover funeral expenses but that was denied because of the GoFundMe. The applicant was never asked to disclose this, which leads me to believe that somewhere in the Department there is someone who, when they see a tragic death in a community, goes online to look to see if a GoFundMe was set up. That is immoral to me and does not sit right. Furthermore, when someone applies for an exceptional needs payment, they are asked to disclose the means they have at the moment. They are not asked to disclose any future means they may have. At the time of the application, the family had not received any benefit from the GoFundMe - there is not even any guarantee this family will receive the money from it - yet it was assessed on it anyway. I submitted parliamentary questions to the Minister on this recently to see how widespread the practice was because I do not believe it is an isolated incident. Another issue related to appeals that is coming up with us regularly has to do with how fuel allowance is awarded. If you are on an invalidity pension and you are able to move onto a CE scheme – and it is welcome when someone is looking to come off invalidity payments and come back to the workspace – you are not allowed to apply for fuel allowance. I am asking that this be examined. Also, if an adult is working and still living at home with their parents, the parents are not allowed to apply for the fuel allowance. I have raised how this scenario of working adults living at home is happening more often because of the housing crisis and I would like the Minister to look at it. I wish to raise a final matter that I have raised before. I have noticed a pattern with people coming to me with the same problem around the domiciliary carers allowance. A very high percentage of applicants seem to be turned down on their first application only to get it on appeal. Figures I received last year told me that 33% of all first-time applicants for the domiciliary care allowance were refused. Fifty percent of those appealed and of the 2,146 appeals, over 1,300 were successful. On that evidence, I would recommend to any parent out there who was denied domiciliary carers allowance to appeal it because on the evidence I have from the Minister’s Department, they are likely to win. As one parent said to me, you would think the Government just wants people to go away after the first application is denied. To be honest, looking at these figures, it is hard not to agree with that sentiment. --- 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/2026-09-22/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-09-28T05:50:49+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-09-22