Dr. Tom Boland:

I think Deputy Tully is absolutely right that there should be research done on all areas. I know that Joe Whelan in Trinity is starting work on the working family payment. In a way, we do need to branch out to study the experiences in all of these areas. We have a lot of evidence. People in interviews report to Ray Griffin and I and also to Michael McGann, and in the Finnish research that people moved from jobseeker's payment to a disability payment. They say they will go down to the doctor and claim something or other in order to not be put through the wringer and their entitlement becomes more automatic. That is the negative side of these stories about the things that go on.

In regard to carers, when we are thinking about a welfare state for the future, we have a great new innovation in the Irish system whereby we have an automatic income for artists of €350 a week for a certain cohort. Why should we not have the same system for carers? We could say that if a person has to be a carer, we will support him or her because they are doing the work of the state. People are outsourced by the state to mind people in a certain way. If we are thinking about the future of the welfare state, at the moment most of its money goes into pensions, which is the largest single block. Additionally, what it does is it sits between people in the labour market, between society and the economy. They are heating up the labour market. In a way, what we actually need is for the welfare state to act to cool down the labour market to say: "Slow down, you can go caring, whether it is for your children or somebody with a particular care need in your home, in order that we have an ecologically sustainable economy." At the moment, we are sort of addicted to growth, which means that we push people towards any job whatsoever to speed things up.

Our colleagues, Mary Murphy and Fiona Dukelow have been producing work on an eco-social state. In order to deal with the green challenge which is coming up, we really need to work less, work less frequently or work smarter or more efficiently, but to work in such a way that we have less of a carbon footprint; and allowing the people we are talking about, who are out at work and then go back home to care, the time to just care or to work one job rather than two jobs in a household. We used to have 1 million people in the labour market in Ireland in the 1980s. All kinds of things were wrong with that, because it was a patriarchal system and there was the breadwinner. There were all kinds of things which were not right about it, but they produced enough goods and services to keep the country going. Now we have 2.5 million people in employment in Ireland today and certainly we could do with fewer of them. We will have fewer of them as we have the greying of the population and fewer people will be in work. It is perfectly possible for these people to produce all the goods and services we need. In Ireland we have a nice tier of population. Other countries around Europe have far fewer people working. It is a way of thinking of the welfare state as a support rather than as an accelerator of the labour market, which leads to the kind of problems that Dr. Fitzpatrick was talking about in terms of the pressure that we have mentioned many times.