Dr. Tom Boland:

Turning first to universal basic income, it is often portrayed as the big coming idea. It has strong supporters. Guy Standing, the famous international academic, published a book on it recently. It is interesting that it is an idea supported by Silicon Valley billionaires and Milton Friedman, who called it the negative income tax. The idea is that you just float the economy by giving everybody a certain amount as a payment. It is something that seems like it might solve everything but, on the other hand, it sometimes seems like it might just be too good to be true. The thing about universal basic income, UBI, is that it puts a floor under poverty, which is an argument for it. It certainly does not do anything to change the way inequality grows within society or the way in which we distribute wealth within a society. It is a limited approach. It also seems so out there that I prefer not to pursue it. It seems that it would be such an enormous transformation as to be almost beyond reckoning.

With regard to the cost of living, an issue Dr. Fitzpatrick has raised, I will mention the generous welfare payments that we have talked about. As I said at the start, by "generous", I mean generous in spirit rather than necessarily generous in amount because we do have high rates of poverty in Ireland. We also have high rates of child poverty, as we were talking about that issue. I do not have the statistics in front of me but Social Justice Ireland produces yearly reports and the most recent said that something like 700,000 people are at risk of poverty. This is the thing. The current cost-of-living crisis as regards the price of fuel and ordinary goods means that the buying power of these basic welfare payments, which Dr. Fitzpatrick mentioned, is eroded year on year. As such, we should not be too quick to pat ourselves on the back about the generosity of these payments. In the Republic of Ireland, we always tend to compare ourselves to the UK or, even more frequently, to Northern Ireland. Those comparisons might not represent a very good average. With regard to European averages, we may just be somewhere in the middle of the table, even if we are doing better than the UK. It is important to take this in the wider context.