Ms Clare Duffy:

I will focus on some of the social welfare things. The Senator asked how to value care. At its very simplest, we can value care by stopping penalising carers. Our system penalises carers for the contribution they make. Hopefully we are going to fix the pension anomaly but heretofore and as it stands today we penalises carers. When they reach retirement age they get less, if anything at all, because they cared. Sometimes when families apply for a home care package - apologies for my language - they are penalised by virtue of the fact that a carer is present in the home and therefore the case is not deemed as urgent as a family where that is not the case. At its simplest level, we have to stop punishing and penalising them. Then we can begin to move towards valuing them. Some of the outcomes needed relate to access to respite and the right to a break from their caring role. We cannot even deliver on things parents and children with disabilities currently have a right to, such as the right to an education for a child with additional needs. We have to address the problems in the system as they exist now before we can get to enshrining value for carers.

On the social welfare system itself, the Senator talked about individualisation. I agree with her completely. In the model we use at the moment, couples are means tested together. It is normally the wife has nothing, or no income, but because her husband is sitting on a load of land or money in the bank, she gets nothing. Husbands will often say "She is your mother, not even my mother, and you want me to subsidise that care?". We assume husbands are willing to share their pensions, because that is how the current pension system works, or their income but that is not always the case. We are placing women in this awful situation of dependency and vulnerability, not just during their active years of caregiving but also afterwards. The Senator herself referred to the long-term consequences of caring. It is hard to believe. As to how we address that, I have already said it. We need to abolish the means test and create a universal basic income or a participation income, whatever language you want to use. That in and of itself would abolish that individualisation, which is so damaging and is contributing to the statistics Mr. Dunne read out earlier. Within our three social welfare schemes, up to 83% of recipients or claimants are women. That is not by accident. It is because the system is structured in such a way that it contributes to that.