Seán Canney (Galway East, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank all the witnesses this evening. Listening to the debate it appears we could be at this for years without achieving anything. As Dr. Healy says, thousands of hours have gone into the work.

I wish to raise three points with the witnesses in the context of social welfare and taxation. Self-employed people seem to miss out on social welfare if they are out sick. They do not get the same type of supports that employed people get. They are often sole traders working on their own who have a family to rear as well. How can we deal with them within the taxation and social welfare system? After the crash in particular, a lot of small subcontractors lost their work. They were owed money and they were left without any support. It created significant problems for a cohort of people who probably were not organised and who did not have representation and were left to their own devices, silently, to look after everything. They probably had borrowings as well at the same time.

The other cohort of people I wonder about is those with disabilities. We talk about a basic income and all that entails. It has been proven that a person with a disability needs more money to live. How is that factored in when we are addressing the taxation and social welfare system?

How do we ensure we start the process of putting a payment in place for the additional costs people with disabilities have, outside cost-of-living costs? I would like our guests' opinions on that.

There is another area I worry about when we talk about social welfare and fixed incomes and getting them to a level to where people can live with dignity. I am thinking of people who want to leave social protection support to go into work and how they find, after entering the workplace, that their take-home pay, when the cost of going to work, the loss of privileges, if we can call them that, or the loss of supports like a medical card or whatever it may be are taken into account, leaves them in a position where they are worse off by working. It should be the aspiration that anybody who wants to work can work and that work will pay for them. How can we address that? It is as big a social justice issue as any other. How does a person who was unemployed for a number of years transition back into work and retain meaningful supports for maybe three to five years to give him or her the chance to do that transition back into work? I could go back on other points but I would like our guests' opinion on those three things.