Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I do not know about that. We will come back to the Deputy on that.

I take the Deputy's point on local elections. I had the pleasure to visit Chile in March as part of the St. Patrick's Day visits. An interesting thing they had there was a constitutional convention. The people decided to reject the new constitution but when they elected the assembly they had gender quotas. More women got elected so they had to bring in more men. It was nice to see that happen once anyway. Interestingly enough, and this is one reason perhaps men should be more open to gender quotas, it can work both ways. That is the point the Deputy is making. That is the first time I heard of it happening.

My uncle in India who died before I was born was the mayor of a town. I visited that town for the first time in 2019. I met the local council and out came an equal number of men and women. I thought that was great to see in this local government in this town in India. Then I found out they had gender quotas in that town in Maharashtra. I am not sure if it is across the state or across India. They have first past the post because many people are innumerate. They got around it by having each community electing one man and one woman. That was interesting, great to see and progressive in a less developed country than Ireland.

The artists' basic income is a really good programme. I am a big fan of the Minister, Deputy Catherine Martin's work in this area. I was supportive of her in trying to get that programme over the line but I do not consider it a universal basic income pilot because it is not universal, by definition. It is only for artists. Universal has to mean everyone. The difficulty in doing a genuine pilot, and there is some interesting research I will publish on this soon, is that most pilots were discontinued or were not continued because, by definition, to have a universal basic income there would have to be winners and losers.

We could not afford a universal basic income that made everyone better off. There would have to be winners and losers. The general thinking is that we could have a universal basic income that is very low. That is affordable but would mean substantial cuts in income for a lot of people, particularly people who are currently on social welfare or we could have a universal basic income that is decent but then one would have to have very high taxes on all earned income. It would also be hard to see who one would get to participate in a pilot scheme that would almost certainly make them worse off. That is one of the difficulties. There is a big piece of research, which I will publish soon, on all of the pilots that were done on this.