Professor Eilion?ir Flynn:

There are a number of things we can do almost immediately. Keeping in mind what the other speakers have shared, we do not need more research, pilots or processes around this because we have had those for decades and we know the evidence base is there for change. We have seen the way that social protection payments were able to quickly adapt in response to the Covid-19 pandemic so there is no reason they could not quickly adapt. It is not even quick, because as others have said, we have been talking about these problems for a long time.

One key area where we could immediately see change is in the likes of the income disregards that have been mentioned by Ms Hughes already in the context of carers but that could also apply in the context of disability allowance. We could also start to work on decoupling some of those secondary benefits and ensure that if the person has a need for those, they are provided regardless of their employment status. That would be important and it would give people the reassurance that basic needs related to their disabilities will be met. It might be easier for people to seek employment or to participate in different ways if those basic needs are being met. Those are simple things that can be done initially.

On what we can do to look to other countries and their good practice, apart from what Mr. Abdalla has already shared about the International Disability Alliance's work, it is interesting to look at other countries that have implemented universal basic income pilots. There is a lot we can learn from those in terms of the ways in which disabled people were included in those pilots or sometimes disadvantaged in those pilots that we can learn from and think about in our context. In Ontario, Canada, for example, there are a lot of lessons from the pilot project on universal basic income, which included disabled people but they lost a lot of their secondary benefits. For some people, that was okay because the amount of the basic income they were receiving was enough to compensate for that but others did not opt into the scheme because it would not have been financially viable for them to do so. We need to consider that.

Simon Duffy and Jim Elder-Woodward have a useful paper on what they call universal basic income plus, which looks at how you could compensate for some of those extra costs related to disability, caring obligations or other criteria, in addition to basic income, and develop a model along those lines, while learning from the experience of the independent living movement in the UK. There is also a lot to be learned from the national disability insurance scheme in Australia, which has had significant problems in its implementation due to the bureaucratic complexity of the model but the intention of the model is a positive one and one that Ireland has a lot of potential to learn from. That is especially so in learning from disabled people who have experience of that model, rather than the bureaucrats simply operating the model. There is a lot of valuable evidence being gathered by activists on the ground that shows some of the limitations of the way that model has been rolled out that we could learn from in making progress here. Those are my interim and short-term suggestions. If we want to learn from other jurisdictions, rather than repeating the same mistakes, those are the areas we could learn from.