Professor Alan Barrett:

I will try to answer the three questions. I will not say an awful lot on the first issue the Chair raised because the proposal or suggestion that the USC and PRSI be merged is very recent. Clearly there are very complicated logistics around it and I do not want to pretend for a moment that the ESRI has given an awful lot of thought to it. The one point we wanted to inject into the analysis is that, if one thinks about it, the USC is essentially a tax and PRSI is a social insurance system. If the two are merged, the PRSI system would be implicitly moved in more of a tax direction or the USC would be moved more in the direction of a social benefit system. If the USC was given more features of a social insurance system, the social insurance system could be enhanced. This point was based on the paper Dr. Shane Whelan produced ten years ago but I have heard others who still talk about it. There is a huge amount of work to be done in working through the logistics of the idea and, again, I do not want to pretend for a moment that we have done much work on it.

On demographics and the increasing of the retirement age to 70, the ESRI was remarkably misquoted on this issue in the newspaper today. I know that I am looking at very sensible people-----