Dr. Mary Murphy:

I thank the members for the opportunity to contribute and for their questions. The dominant issue is the policy rationale for using the live register as the key vehicle through which to prioritise access to activation supports. This is really the structural issue on which we are focusing. We have been here before. Just as we were coming out of the crisis in the late 1990s and early 2000s, there was considerable policy attention on initiatives such as the Partnership 2000 working group on women's access to the labour market and the report from the social partnership process. This concerned the degree to which we should use the live register as the vehicle through which we distribute resources and engage in activation. It is worth pointing out that when we had 4% unemployment, 20% of the working age population were dependent on social welfare. We are fooling ourselves to some degree if we believe the live register is an accurate reflection of phenomena such as poverty or the lack of labour market participation. There is a lot of social welfare hidden in the data in that people are not participating and could be. We need to learn from the past more clearly.

With regard to learning from the present, we know we have a new problem on our hands. Our number of jobless households with children is twice the European average. They are most at risk of poverty and represent a deep structural problem in Irish society and the labour market. This problem needs to drive our activation policy in a way that it may not be driven at present. Those three caveats are important.

Jobless households with children are headed by lone parents in some instances, or people with disabilities or jobseeker families in others. With regard to jobseeker families, 50,000 people in receipt of jobseeker’s allowance or jobseeker's benefit have qualified adults and children. Therefore, there is a very targeted group of householders who are clearly passing payments means tests, have children and are clearly jobless. They have to be a target for activation policy. One question that arises is whether we are making enough of the possibilities of activating the women in those households. Clearly, we are arguing that we are not. Some of the issues that arise concern the degree to which the live register is acting as a barrier to those women. First, there are barriers preventing them from getting onto the live register. That they are not able to do so becomes the barrier to activation.

There is ESRI evidence dating back 20 years that when women are visible in the social welfare protection system, they see themselves as potential labour market participants in a different way than if they are invisible. The State acts on their visibility and invests more in them to move them off social welfare. Visibility, individual access and individual entitlement comprise an important embedded principle.

There are many barriers that we know of. One of the biggest is that one must be looking for full-time work. We know many women, or qualified adults, have children. To some degree, we have been innovative in the recent policy on lone parents. The jobseeker's transition payment recognises that one can be attached in some way to the social welfare system and jobseeker's payment but seek part-time work. There are clear creative opportunities to design access routes to the live register for qualified adults using the transition vehicle. That is one approach.

Other blocks are anomalies such as the three-day week and atypical work. There is ongoing work on this as part of the activation report. There are many cultural issues to be addressed in terms of how we administer the social welfare system. Having to fill out five forms, as mentioned by Senator Marie Moloney, is an issue in this regard. There are cultural barriers faced by women even when trying to make a claim in the local office. The orientation of the social welfare system is, for very good reason, not to incur extra administrative work when it is not useful. Hatch clerk workers tend to say to individuals that there is no point in their signing on in their own right as they will not get any more money. They say signing on is a pain in the neck, that one must fill out various forms, prove one's child care circumstances and prove one is seeking a full-time arrangement. They tell the potential claimants they are wasting their time and should go home. That still happens in the local offices when women try to activate a claim splitting process. Therefore, there are many cultural practices we need to name.

There are a number of clear policy moves we could make to open up that space, even in the context of limited resources. They all need to move towards an individualisation of the tax and social welfare systems. As Deputy Ó Snodaigh said, the fact the tax system is not individualised for cohabiting couples but is for married couples is a structural issue that acts as a disincentive to work. That needs to be looked at, but I want to focus on individualisation of the social welfare system.

People have referred to the spousal swap, which I always thought was unfortunately named, as a popular option for people to take. It is limited and does not address in any structural way what is going on. It is not addressing the possibility of both parents in that household activating into the labour market. We should be trying to maximise the amount of economic activity of both adults in those households. Maybe both of them could get part-time jobs that would add up to a full-time job instead of focusing on one adult or the other. It is very past tense to be doing that. The spousal swap is wrong in its orientation because it is swapping entitlement rather than opening up both parents' orientation to the labour market. That is an important thing. It is a quick fix and may have been welcome for what it did at the time, but it is not the answer.

We need to understand that claim splitting was originally introduced in situations of domestic violence or where the male breadwinner was not delivering money back into the family home. The cultural association of claim splitting in a lot of working class communities is that one needs a letter from a social worker or doctor to prove that one's husband was not giving the money. One would then get the payment in one's own right. Claim splitting is unpopular culturally and we need to know why people do not do it. A lot of the time we say only 1,000 people are looking for claim splitting, so people must not want individual access. That is not the case, however. They do not want something that has a stigma attached to it, so a lot of men in working class households are uncomfortable if their wives seek to split a claim because it is known in the pub as not bringing home the bacon and not giving her the money. We need to understand, therefore, how these things work in practice or why they do not work. Something that is not a spousal swap or claim splitting needs to be deeper.