Professor Mary Murphy:

I will start with the time issue. There is a concept called temporal deprivation, which Tony Fitzpatrick did a lot of work on about ten years ago. He spoke about the ways social policy could engage with the concept of time deprivation. It fits into those kinds of ideas of participation income and recognising the other socially valued ways people choose to spend their time. These things have logic in their communities and their lives but may not fit in with a very narrow understanding of added value in a GNP sense. We are getting at some of that with things like the artists' basic income pilot. Artists are spending their time doing socially valued activity and they should be supported by society, through the State, to do that. Some of those ideas are starting to percolate through to policy. It is about rewarding people for how they spend their time. Translating that from arts and culture into ecological activity or care activity is not such a huge step. A woman in France, Sophie Swaton, is doing a lot of work on what she calls ecological transition income. This is time spent cleaning the beach. She wants to reward people for the ecological time they put into being a good citizen from a sustainability point of view. There are some lovely ideas that are grouped around the concept of rewarding people for socially useful work. All of that points towards that participation income space.

The Senator is absolutely right about the tax relief. I used to think, in my innocence, that if we could name the figure people would be so shocked that it would work. Now I understand that it is going to take a lot more than that. There is €2.4 billion going out in the discretionary pension tax relief and that is so inequitably gendered in terms of who benefits from it from a male-female perspective. However, €15 billion is going out overall in discretionary tax reliefs and it is the same gendered distribution in who benefits from it. That €15 billion would fund so much. Even if we reduced it so people were only allowed discretionary tax relief at 15% and they could keep a bit because of the economic arguments, there is still loads that could be done in that space. I do not understand why that does not have more traction as a political issue because it seems blatantly obvious to me.

Going back to the constitutional question, one of the lessons we learned from repeal is that we should not be putting something into the Constitution unless we are really sure of it. Less is more with constitutions. We have learned a lot about that and paid a high price for putting things in. Having said that, this is clearly an opportunity to put value on care and promote the idea of the State's obligation to care. Care has a very wide social value because otherwise we would narrow the concept of it. It is that idea of a careful State. With the trade unions beginning to ask about services in the context of collective bargaining, there is an increasing understanding that the services and income together make up the package through which people have to mediate their lives. Universal basic services, participation income and quality wages for care in the mainstream labour market together cover quite a broad spectrum of where we would like the State umbrella to be with regard to care. That might give some sort of framework for thinking about this. I will not mention any specific policies but maybe we can think about the concept of the State's obligation to be a careful State and provide the umbrella of services and income that people need to value the time they spend on care.