Professor Alan Barrett:

It is not the job of the ESRI to say what the distribution of income or wealth should be in Ireland but it is its job to measure these things and provide the evidence about issues around distribution. The ESRI does this probably more than any other group in the country. I have spoken before in this committee about the SWITCH model, which does all the distribution analysis around the budgets, but the programme of research is much broader than that. Just to remind members, we are the Economic and Social Research Institute, and while the "S" is smaller relative to the "E", for many years there has been a very strong strand of social research within the institute. Only this week a paper came across my desk looking at social class, social risk and issues around quality of life, looking across different groups and, for example, looking at inequality beyond issues just related to income. It addresses the impacts of those income inequalities on issues such as mental strain, perceptions of quality of life and all these sorts of things. The institute is very deeply involved in these sorts of issues. That is correct - it is what we should be doing. We should not be saying what the distribution of income should be but should be providing the information as to precisely what it is. I can absolutely stand over this sort of claim. We know more about inequalities in Ireland as a result of ESRI research going back over the past 30 years. I may have said before to this committee or its predecessor that nobody was measuring the rate of poverty in Ireland before the ESRI started in 1989. A huge volume of research has been carried out since then.