I ask the Leader to invite the Minister, Deputy Calleary, to come in to speak on his portfolio and particularly on family carers. There was a very good briefing last Wednesday from Family Carers Ireland as part of the cross-party interest group. There is a lot of concern and distress among family carers across the country and there are a number of issues they have had to deal with in recent months and years. One is the automatic reporting of carer payments to Revenue. Approximately 34,000 letters have been sent to carers, which have created anxiety within that community. There is fear and confusion around tax liability because of media reports and Revenue correspondence. More than 2,000 phone calls were made to helplines by distressed carers who believed they might have historic tax liabilities. There are issues in relation to the carer’s allowance and carer's benefit that are taxable, unlike the carer’s support grant. That reduces already low household incomes and penalises full-time carers financially.

They also spoke about the high out-of-pocket costs for carers. Carers are facing substantial, ongoing expenses, the likes of therapy, speech and language and physical therapy, mobility aids, medical equipment and specialised consultations. There are a number of requests the carers who spoke last week and Family Carers Ireland in particular have. Those are to make the carer’s allowance and carer's benefit tax exempt, to end the means test and taxation of caring payments, to improve communication and tone in official response, to increase payment levels to reflect real care costs and inflation, to reform tax credits to reflect caregiving realities and to update carer policies to reflect modern economic and social conditions.

We can all appreciate the amount of work carers do across this country to look after and support people. From an economic perspective, the work they do means an estimated €20 billion a year in savings for the Government that it does not have to pay in hospital, caring and professional fees.

An awful lot of this is done by families, and by women in particular. This is a sector where we have done an awful lot in the last couple of years, but there is certainly more to do. We certainly should not be creating more anxiety for people who are just trying to care for their loved ones.