Social Welfare Appeals
Dail Éireann — 2026-09-24
============================================================

Louise O'Reilly (SF), Dublin Fingal West

The domiciliary care allowance and disability allowance are particular concerns for me. I have spoken previously about the issues. It is rough on the families. They have to write about their children on their worst days and about all the bad things that they do to the family. That is not where people want to be. Considerable work could be done by the Minister's Department in advance of that.
Notwithstanding that, for 60% of domiciliary care allowance applications, the original decision is overturned on appeal. The Minister is telling us that 45% of appeals are upheld and 24% of them are upheld without having to go to a higher officer. That is not a case of more information being added. That points to something being missed in the first instance.
I want to convey to the Minister on behalf of my constituents and the multiple people who have contacted me about the issue that the appeals process is very rough for those people who are going through it. When their circumstances do not change, their appeals are being overturned. I understand that there is sometimes new evidence but sometimes there is none, and that is a problem.

---

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/2026-09-24/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-09-28T05:50:50+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-09-24