Dr. Karina Doorley:

Dr. McGuinness made a good point about the stigma of social welfare. One of the positive things about UBI is that there is no stigma attached to it. It is for everybody. Take-up of social welfare is strongly linked to how universal it is. You find that with social welfare payments which are somewhat complicated in how they are designed or in their income or employment requirements, take-up tends to be low. On the other side, payments like child benefit or pensions, where you have very clear eligibility criteria, have very high levels of take-up. The Deputy's question was about finding alternatives to UBI which might be seen as far too expensive to be even considered. Increasing take-up of social welfare is really important. Social welfare cannot function to alleviate poverty unless people actually avail of it. The ways to do that include automating it but to do that you need information - for example, you need Revenue records linked to Department of Social Protection records so that you can automatically give people the payments they are entitled to. Another way to do it is by simplifying payments, as the commission has recommended. Professor McGuinness is back with us.