Professor Mary Murphy:

Yes, the money is divided by two. That is what we believe the implementation group needs to do. It needs to sit down and ask how we get to a stage where the income disregards are increasing. At some stage the potential to do that is maximised. It is difficult to do it in the context of keeping pace with income disregards as designed into other welfare payments. At some stage we have to break from the working age welfare payment model, which is eventually going to restrict capacity, to increasing income disregards continually. We argue that at some stage we need to break from the means-tested idea of the working age payment system we have and introduce a new way of looking at carer's allowance. When and how that is done is an incremental choice of an implementation process that we estimate could take three, four or five years. We are not saying it can be done tomorrow or indeed in one bang in 2027. There would be a staged process to do that work. It would be somewhere in the middle of incremental versus big bang.

On widening eligibility versus increasing the rate, we are clearly coming down on the side of widening eligibility in how we have framed the proposal. We have said the proposal should be implemented at the current rate, anticipating that the extra cost of bringing in all those extras that Dr. Dunne just mentioned, will cost €397 million in the first instance. We are prioritising the use of resources by keeping it at the same rate but widening the eligibility in the first instance and then seeing what the rate should be in the context of the wider politics of income adequacy and the recommendations in the Commission on Taxation and Welfare for a mechanism to assess benchmarking and indexation. We are clear that the difficulty that so many people are frozen out of any support at all for their caring work requires that eligibility be widened in that way. That is the first point.

On the idea of the carer's benefit being increased to five years, I would not be averse to that. From a gender equity point of view, as a general yardstick, and this is where the Deputy will agree the theory and practice begin to get problematic, there is a sense that payments derived from a previous engagement with the labour market will generally tend to disadvantage people who have not had that engagement with the labour market because they will not have built up the entitlement in the insurance base. The Deputy talked about marginalised people and people with literacy issues, and we are talking about migrants, women, small farmers. They will tend not to have the entitlement to carer's benefit in the first instance. It will privilege a certain cohort of carer.