Mr. Tim Duggan:

The homemaker provision was introduced in 1994. However, at the time it did not have any retrospective effect and only applied from that date on. My understanding is that the reason it was not retrospective was that the costs involved would be significant. It is not possible to be entirely definitive about those costs without doing a lot of spadework, so to speak. Typically, we do an analysis based on the child benefit records which have only been computerised since the early 1980s. One would have to go through paper to go back beyond that, which would be difficult enough. At the time, it was estimated tentatively that the cost would be the equivalent today of €160 million. This was approximately 4% of the pensions spend at the time. Since then, we have done quite a detailed analysis of this. If we were to introduce a homemaker measure with no start date from January 2017, we estimate it would be an additional €290 million per annum.