Professor Mary Murphy:

One of the immediate benefits is that all carers who are on a reduced-rate payment, if we abolished the means test, would then be on the full-rate payment and that includes the cost of bringing up their payments as well. It is quite a comprehensive cost and it is €397 million, to reiterate the sum.

On employment and the different examples Mr. Gough gave, when we carried out the merging and knowledge exercise, we explored the possibility of having an income support, on the one hand, or an employment support, on the other hand, and both of them could be understood as valuing people’s participation. There is no contradiction between doing them in that way, but we felt the primary step we needed to take, first and foremost, was to abolish the means test and put in place a non-means-tested participation income for family care. After that, there are a number of creative ways of recognising that some people may well prefer to receive their income in the form of a wage and there are options and mechanisms to do that from the international literature and, indeed, from our own experience in Ireland, given we have good experience of active labour market measures as examples of how those kinds of well-being institutions might be set up at a county level, for example. We felt that the first job, however, had to be abolishing the means test and getting us into the next space.