Professor Alan Barrett:

Yes, I can imagine. I just glanced in that direction and saw a smiling face.

That would look good from a distribution perspective but some people would question whether a budget like that would have economic impacts that are worth discussing. At that level, one wants to have interactions and parallel analysis using the macroeconomic model and the SWITCH model. I have heard people criticise SWITCH on that basis, namely that it can give one a particular outcome but that it is partial.

The Deputy mentioned our analysis of the back to education allowance scheme and criticisms of that. Just to be clear on that, the Department of Social Protection asked us to do a study to determine the employment effects of the back to education allowance. The ESRI was asked a very clear question and had a contract to deliver on that. We answered that question, which was that the allowance had very little impact on people's employment. We said in the report that there were multiple reasons for having such a programme and that it may be doing spectacularly well in other dimensions but we were not asked to look at those other dimensions. If one thinks in terms of a committee, I can imagine a politician who is very enthusiastic about the back to education programme and believes it is wonderful because it does A, B and C, where A might be generating good pathways back to employment. I believe there is value in even partially looking at and interrogating whether programmes are doing what they claim to do. There was a similar issue with regard to community employment schemes. For a long time there was a narrative around community employment that suggested that it was an employment programme. I could say that the ESRI said but the ESRI never says anything - ESRI researchers write their reports and are responsible for the content. The ESRI simply publishes material and gives it a stamp to verify that it has passed refereeing processes and that the institute believes the analysis is sufficiently robust. The ESRI itself never says anything. On community employment, the researchers said that the scheme was not an effective way of getting people back into mainstream employment. That was all.

The last point I would make is that one of the research programmes currently under way at the ESRI is with Pobal. To come back to an earlier theme about research and why it should be more interactive, the ESRI has being doing evaluations with Pobal. That organisation has raised a very important point with the ESRI. We have been looking at the effect of Pobal programmes on individuals. Let us say for example the question is whether a particular Pobal programme helps to get people back into the labour market. However, Pobal is very interested in the community-level impact of what it is doing. Pobal has come back to the ESRI, told us that what we are doing is really good but have asked us to develop tools and mechanisms that will allow for an assessment of whether certain programmes are having a community-level effect. We are now talking to Pobal about how this might be done. That is a really positive example of us producing research output, engaging with an agency which asks us to do more and then the ESRI trying to do that.

The last issue raised concerned various Departments doing lots of analyses-----