Yesterday, Family Carers Ireland's published its fourth scorecard in which it assesses the programme for Government and gives its response to 34 items that are priorities for the organisation. A quick résumé would be that out of the 34 sectors covering the programme for Government, two report good progress and 15 report limited progress. That is over 50% with good or limited progress but, alas, 13 of the areas report no progress at all and four of them actually report regression in the response to the programme. That is moderately encouraging, but it is probably something that deserves a more concentrated response.

That was the state of play as of the end of quarter 3 in 2025. I will quote another pertinent paragraph:

Based on Healthy Ireland estimates, 14% of people aged 15 and older provide regular unpaid personal help to a friend or family member with a long-term illness, health problem or disability. When extrapolated to the national population, this equates to 624,190 family carers.

Many of those are working pro bono or for very little pay.

In fairness to those 624,000 carers who do so much work on behalf of us all and on behalf of the State, we should have a debate with the Minister for Social Protection in this House addressing all of the issues and concerns, the undoubted successes that the Government has had, the many shortfalls, and what we can do to hasten our steps to get a more perfect picture for the people who are ultimately very vulnerable in society and the very caring and altruistic people who look after them.