Social Welfare Bill 2021: Committee and Remaining Stages
Seanad Éireann — 2021-12-17
============================================================

Lynn Boylan (SF), Agricultural Panel

I move amendment No. 4:
In page 8, between lines 15 and 16, to insert the following:
“Report on the means-testing for Blind Pension and Disability Allowance
14. The Minister shall prepare and lay a report before both Houses of the Oireachtas on the means-testing eligibility requirement for Blind Pension and Disability Allowance and the impact that income threshold limitations have on access to these schemes and that the report shall be presented to the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Social Protection within nine months of the passing of this Act.”.
I will be like a broken record. I know the Minister gave a commitment on Committee Stage in the Dáil to refer this issue to the national disability inclusion strategy steering group for consideration. The existing means-testing requirements are rigid and limiting for disabled people due to being based on entire household income. On the basis I outlined, we will withdraw the amendment.

---

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/seanad/2021-12-17/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:49:59+00:00
Sitting date: 2021-12-17