Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Chair. I appreciate the presentation and the written documentation from Dr. Keane. I have a couple of questions. There has been more discussion of indexation over the last period than there was in the preceding decade, for different reasons. Let us say we were to index social welfare rates in the context of budget 2022. If we were to index, for example, the core working age payment in line with the cost of price inflation what increase would we have been likely to see? We saw a €5 increase in the core working-age payment in budget 2022. Alongside that, what in the researchers' view is the best way to index social welfare rates with the aim of protecting people from poverty? Should it be price indexation as opposed to wage indexation?