I had a look at the Fine Gael website, which is not something I normally do. The party has an ad running with the title "Fine Gael supported carers and people with disabilities in Budget 2026". Sometimes you need to check in case it is AI or whatever, but how exactly did Fine Gael support carers and people with disabilities? Could the Minister of State, Deputy Naughton, explain that? I am going to go with disabled organisations and individuals rather than Fine Gael on this one. If we learned anything in the last few years, it should have been to listen to disabled people and to the force they are, given the care referendum, the Green Paper being pushed back and so on. I am a little mystified as to why the Government picked out disabled people for no help at all in the budget. People were joking with grim humour about what they were going to spend the €10 a week on, but that €10 was completely taken away by all the other things. The Irish Wheelchair Association estimates disabled people are €1,400 worse off and the Disability Federation of Ireland said the same. Is the Minister of State saying they are lying? I ask because €1,400 is quite a lot of money. The reason for this is the withdrawal of the one-off payments that were provided in the last couple of budgets. We all know, or should know, that the permanent cost of disability is massive. The most conservative estimates put that cost at between €10,000 and €15,000, and I would say that is way underestimated. There was a promise to introduce a permanent cost-of-disability payment. That has now been delayed until 2027. That is another broken promise. There needs to be a permanent cost-of-disability payment because households are paying way over the odds if they have a disabled person. In actual numbers, that cost is estimated at anything from €300 per week upwards. It should be noted that the reason for the drop-off is the disability support grant, the living alone allowance and the one-off payments for electricity and so on. One in five people who are disabled is already living in consistent poverty and the Government has made it so much worse. A lot of people mentioned carers, and rightly so. The means test for carers should be removed but, again, nothing has really been done on that. There should not be a means test for disabled people either. I submitted a parliamentary question some time back on what it would cost to get rid of the means test for disabled people. The answer I got was that it would cost €6 billion, which is laughable. It was essentially based on every single person who is disabled claiming it, which the Minister of State knows is not true because lots of disabled people do not claim any payments whatsoever. I am not saying she drew up that answer; I am just giving her an example of why it was ludicrous. Even if everyone who has a very severe disability was not means tested, the cost would be about €500 million, roughly what it cost to give the developers the apartment incentives the Government gave them in the budget through tax write-offs and so on. The Government made its priorities very clear with those decisions. I think Deputy Boyd Barrett alluded to this issue earlier. It has been pointed out to me by disabled people that there is a marriage bar in place because if they get married, they lose their income and are reduced to poverty, meaning so many disabled people cannot get married. This was pointed out to me by two disabled people who got married in the last year. They have taken a financial hit from that because one becomes the dependant of the other. We have had marriage equality campaigns and we are going to need a campaign to allow disabled people the right to get married, thanks to the absolute privileging of profit, capital, big business and corporations at every hand’s turn by this Government and previous Governments Fine Gael has been a part of.

Sentiment score: 0.03