Professor Mary Murphy:

The Senator welcomed the report, as well as its focus on abolishing the means test. I will emphasise that you will not just bring in a wider group of people who will become eligible when you abolish the means test; you will also abolish the demeaning process and the administration costs. That cost of €397 million is therefore actually good value. I wanted to firmly put this on the record. It has been mooted in terms of other costs, such as the figure of €1.2 million, which a couple of people mentioned. That figure of €1.2 million came from an assessment which was based on the notion that everybody who was said to be a carer would automatically get carer's allowance. That is not what we are proposing. Let us be really clear about that. We are proposing that there is to be no means test, but that there should be quite stringent medical and carer processes-----