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

Dara Calleary (FF), Mayo

I assure the Deputy that we are very much focused on carers. If he thinks I am not giving away much, he should talk to the Minister for public expenditure. We are working hard in this space. In 2026, we invested €2.2 billion in carer's support payments, which is a really solid indication of where we are going on this. We pay the carer's support grant on 4 June every year, or the first Thursday in June every year. Since then, which is maybe less than three months ago, an additional 5,000 people have come into payment. I will ask my Department to do a bit of awareness-building that this grant is available. A lot of people who may be entitled to it may not realise they can draw it down without a means test. We are going to do some work on that. Most of us in this room would be a very effective channel of communicating that availability to people.
We had a discussion earlier. We need to make more information available to people. We have a lot of schemes, and this is one of them. I am pretty sure we will do that.

---

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