Alice-Mary Higgins (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses for attending. There are lots of questions that I want to ask. It is very hard to decide where to go. In terms of the future, there seems to be a mandate for change. We heard from people who have been involved in the assembly that the citizens were really open to a reimagining of care. They were open not just to investing more in care, but doing it very differently. On the idea of having a public childcare system, or a very strong public element to the childcare system, I ask the witnesses to comment on the importance of the childcare system being universally accessible. We know that some of the concerns around childcare at the moment are in respect of community childcare access. The idea is that childcare should not be something that is simply for parents who are working or in education, but something that children should get from the beginning. It also gives people the space to have opportunities. I ask the witnesses to comment on the idea of care not just being an addendum to work and employment but something that we collectively value in itself. Dr. Emily Murphy of TASC mentioned the employment area. I ask the witnesses to comment further on the importance of progression pathways to enable those in the care sector to plan a five- or ten-year career, ensuring that it gets better, their pay increases and there is a career ladder. I think that a lot of the time people feel that a career in care work gets to a point where it hits a plateau and remains there. That leads people to think that they cannot spend 30 years working in the sector, for example.

I was really interested in Dr. Barry's comments around value and how value is calculated. We did not have a survey on wealth information for a long time but the deprivation index was a reverse way to see who did not have wealth, namely, lone parents among whom there were extraordinarily high levels of deprivation. Similarly, there is a time poverty issue. I ask the witnesses for their thoughts on the mechanisms required to ensure that care is valued and captured and how we address that. I refer to valuing care in terms of the support we can provide, including through initiatives such as the participation payment and others and how we can ensure the value of care is captured in our economic and social modelling. As Dr. Barry mentioned, there has been a shift on that and a new semester process is happening at the European level, where we are meant to be looking at new measures of society and new approaches to measuring GDP, ensuring that other indicators are considered aside from GDP. I ask the witnesses for their thoughts on that.

On Professor Mary Murphy's comments, I like the idea of participation income moving forward. One issue we must address on which we have a mandate from the citizens concerns those who have suffered historically as a result of the way we have treated care, the social protection system as it is now, and individualisation in the social protection system, specifically. For example, many women will not be able to access a full pension and will not be able to get even a basic pension because they will be means-tested and their partner's wages will be taken into account. Changes that were made to the social protection system for lone parents in Ireland did not recognise lone parents balancing care responsibilities with other work, certainly after the child reached the age of 14. The issue of income disregards is one that the citizens specifically raised.

On pension reform, we have heard about the idea of acknowledging care within our pension system. The problem is that there is talk of acknowledging an extra ten years of care within the system, but there is a proposal to push the requirement to 40 years of contributions. We go from having a requirement of 30 years of contributions with ten years of care recognised, to a requirement of 40 years of contributions with 20 years of care recognised. We are effectively in danger of ending up in the exact same position where many women will not be in receipt of a full contributory pension. That is another area in which perhaps a universal measure would be best.

Even though I would like the philosophical work on care to move forward, I am also conscious that the citizens gave really good granular recommendations on social protection policy. Another issue to be addressed is the legacy of the marriage bar. How do we untangle the issues around the single breadwinner model that is still a little bit embedded in our social protection system, and introduce one that really recognises both care and work?