Professor Mary Murphy:

I welcome the questions. They clearly are grounded in reality and that is important. I would like to think that our capacity to do research is informed by our own life experience. I worked as the welfare officer with the Irish National Organisation of the Unemployed, INOU, in the early 1990s. I then worked as the policy officer for the Society of St. Vincent De Paul in the late 1990s so I come from a welfare practitioner background. I appreciate that what you can do in theory often cannot be done in practice.

Trying to bridge those two spaces is really difficult. I was also on the expert working group of the Commission on Taxation and Welfare from 2011 to 2014. It did copious amounts of spreadsheets about everything that could be done and made hardly any recommendations that were used.

In regard to the first of the five issues the Deputy raised, the incremental approach versus the big bang approach, how we are trying to frame this research is that if an implementation group, which may have been announced in the budget yesterday, were set up now, we do not anticipate that any payment could be introduced until 2027. We are not suggesting a big bang but a pathway approach. That would take a number of years to craft, step by step, until it reached a fully-fledged implementation timeframe, which would be around 2027. We are conscious that the income disregards increased yesterday, in part due to the work of Family Carers Ireland and the committee's recommendations. That is inching in that direction. The €1,000 per household is a really important way of inching up the income towards-----