A rural TD has called for an urgent reform of the Fair Deal scheme to protect farm and business families.

If you are approved for Fair Deal, you pay a certain amount towards the total cost of nursing home care and Health Service Executive (HSE) pays the balance.

For example, if the amount you've been told to pay is €400 a month and the nursing home costs €1,200 a month, HSE will pay the balance of €800.

Independent Ireland leader, Deputy Michael Collins has warned that thousands of farm and small business families are facing financial devastation due to what he has described as "outdated and unfair" rules within the system.

Deputy Collins claimed that the current structure of the Nursing Homes Support Scheme — commonly known as Fair Deal — fails to reflect the realities of family farming and small enterprise in rural Ireland, and risks forcing families to sell their land or businesses to cover spiralling nursing home costs.

“The Fair Deal scheme is no longer fit for purpose when it comes to farm and business families,” Deputy Collins said.

“People who spent a lifetime building up their land or family business, often with the intention of handing it on to the next generation, are now being punished by a system that doesn’t recognise how rural life and long-term leasing works.”

Under current rules, families may apply for a cap that limits the contribution of farm or business assets to nursing home costs to three years, but only if strict conditions are met.

One of those conditions is that the farm or business must be ‘actively operated’. The successor must commit to farming the land for six years from the time Fair Deal is approved.

However, according to Deputy Collins, this excludes thousands of landowners who leased out land in good faith, often under long-term lease agreements actively encouraged by the state to promote land mobility and generational renewal.

“These people did the right thing,” Deputy Collins said. “They followed state advice, entered into long-term leases to give younger farmers a chance, and now they’re being penalised for it. That’s indefensible.”The Independent Ireland TD referenced recent figures that reveal that more than 13,000 individuals who have land under long-term lease arrangements are likely to be excluded from the three-year cap.

"As a result, they face annual nursing home charges that can exceed €70,000, and in some cases reach €120,000, without the protections offered to others," he stated.

He claimed that the financial burden has already led to some families being forced to sell land to meet the cost of care.

Deputy Collins is calling for a full review and amendment of the Fair Deal rules to ensure that long-term leased land is recognised as part of an 'actively farmed' holding, particularly where the lease was encouraged under state-supported schemes.

He is also asking for a path for families to nominate a successor, even where the farm was leased, without losing eligibility for the three-year asset cap.“We are simply asking for fair treatment for families,” Deputy Collins said.

"If the state encouraged long-term leasing for good policy reasons, it cannot now turn around and punish those same families when they need care," the TD concluded.