Dr. Mary Murphy:

Ideally, we do. In that instance, however, it offers the opportunity that one of the parents in a household is seeking full-time work while the other one has care obligations for a certain time period but is eligible for the jobseeker's transition payment. It allows one to open up that space whereby both see themselves as potential labour market actives. In the longer term, they can manage their household and orientation around that framework.

The Chairman is right in that, over time, we would like to see the cultural sharing of care open up in a more meaningful way. This opens up those possibilities. It is not necessarily a question of who would be the jobseeker's transition payment recipient. It is open to either person and is not necessarily a gender decision. It is recognising that there are children in the house who need care. Let us be realistic, therefore, that there will not be two full-time workers in a house. In most households in Ireland there are not two full-time workers. The dominant model is 1.5.

Introducing default for first-time claimants would open up the system a little bit and allow us to build on it. As resources open up and, hopefully, we move into economic growth, we could remove the limitation rule for parents who want to opt into labour market participation.

One of the big issues is that there are live register implications. The politics of this are difficult because if one brings more people into means-tested jobseeker's allowance and jobseeker's benefit payments, the live register goes up. There is room to be creative around that, however, in terms of how we measure unemployment. It is possible to have different measurements of unemployment. For example, we could have a measurement showing how many households are unemployed, rather than how many individuals. That could get over the problem, but it is not something I would get stuck on. If the principle is accepted, we could work around the politics of what the implications would be.

I can see that Senator Moloney has to go.