Ms Orla O'Connor:

I want to respond to the other question asked by Deputy Ryan and Deputy Ó Snodaigh. It was the issue of investment in services. To be clear, the National Women's Council supports a second year of preschool. We think that is very important. Our position, and what is being said so often by women over the past few years, is that it cannot be introduced at the expense of child benefit. On the conversation that took place in the women's council, we were in a different place about eight years ago and people were looking at, if the Government made a reduction, what else might happen, particularly around medical cards for children and child care. It has completely changed. The members of the women's council are in a completely different position in terms of saying how much women need child benefit for basic household bills. It cannot be a trade-off now. We are not in that scenario.

On the point about high earners getting child benefit, from our perspective child benefit is important as a payment for all children and we believe that it needs to be maintained in that way. We completely accept the argument on redistribution of wealth in Ireland. What we have been advocating in the National Women's Council is that we need to look at other ways of doing that. Consistently, in pre-budget submissions, we have been advocating a third rate of tax as a way of doing it, which would bring in far more revenue than looking at, for example, what we were looking at previously which was the taxation of child benefit. There are other ways of redistributing wealth, but once one starts cutting child benefit, one will cut back on families who need it.