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

No, I am not. What I am going to do is publish the interesting research. It is lays out the pros and cons not just of doing it as a policy, which no country has done, but also the problems with all of the pilot schemes that have been done around the world, which have largely failed for lots of different reasons.

Where the initiative can work is if a country has massive oil or mineral wealth so the government can take the money generated and give everyone a slice of it. In a country like Ireland where our wealth is derived from labour ,we could only do this by having winners and losers. It is very hard to see how a pilot scheme could be constructed where people, if randomly selected, agreed to participate in a pilot scheme that would definitely make them worse off but maybe they would.