I raise the issue of the cost-of-living crisis. Earlier, I attended a meeting of the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Disability Matters. Again, we had disabled citizens in tears describing their abject living conditions and the enduring and grinding poverty that they are forced to live in in this country. We are outliers in the European sense in that throughout the European Union, the disability allowance as we know it is disaggregated or not connected to income. It is a non-means-tested universal payment. We means-test. This year, the ESRI released figures for the cost of disability. This is not the cost of buying clothes or paying for groceries, rent or heating. This is before a person puts their hand in their pocket. The actual extra cost of having a disability of Ireland is between €488 and €550 per week. That is between €25,000 and €28,000 a year in extra costs such as medical costs, equipment, extra heating and transport. In total, the disability allowance is less than half of that. We need to have a non-means-tested universal payment of disability allowance.

While I welcome the discussion at government level on introducing a cost-of-disability payment, these are not hidden costs. They are quantified. What is not quantified is the moral distress, suffering, fear and anxiety that disabled person experience every day unnecessarily. According to one of the contributors this morning - a beautiful young man who is disabled with an honour's degree in history and a first-class master's degree - he experiences structural penalties on a daily basis. That is evidence of an ableist state. I ask for a debate in the House on the cost-of-living crisis, specifically as it applies to disabled citizens.