Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

That is easy to rectify. In the past eight years there has been a huge increase in the ability of self-employed people to access benefits such as unemployment benefit and invalidity benefit. It could be argued that the self-employed contribution is disproportionately actuarially good compared to the normal PRSI. One is 14% and the other is 4%. However, that is an argument for another day. Extending this to carers is the kind of thing that can be easily achieved. We have already been incrementally extending the benefits to self-employed people. It used to just be the State pension.

That is still in the reform package, rather than being predicated somewhere. The advantage here is that the more you widen the eligibility, the more you will find out, through real laboratory situations, the actual demand for this if you did take away the means test completely. In other words, you would get out of this argument about the figures of €1.2 billion versus €397 million. Let us remember that this is an argument over which we do not have a huge amount of control because at the end of the day, despite that, the people will be unilaterally on their own or-----