Dr. Seán Healy:

The interaction of low pay with welfare is important. We have been going on about this for quite a while. There are possibly more than 100,000 people who have a job but who are in households that are living in poverty. Social Justice Ireland thinks that the key is making tax credits refundable so that people will benefit from the full value of the tax. The second thing would be to move the minimum wage towards the living wage. In fairness, the Government has both of those items on its agenda. Both of them are mentioned in the programme for Government. We will see what living wage the Government comes up with, but it should certainly be such that it provides the basics completely for somebody with a job. In that context, it would be well clear of welfare. There would be quite a gap between the two and there would be no danger of going back to a time, which has not been the case for a long period, where people would be better off on welfare than they would be in work.