Marc Ó Cathasaigh (Waterford, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I second that. It is a positive move. It is great to see forward progress because Family Carers Ireland have had to fight a long time for what seems to everybody at this committee to be the right thing.

I found the presentations really interesting and I apologise that I am going to be a little bit all over the map, because I have noted points along the way. I found a lot of the presentations very thought provoking, in particular the idea of the big bang versus incrementalism. It is important as well to see any provision in terms of whether people are tweaking around the edges of something or do they have a vision that they are trying to get through. Looking at the pell-mell of government, a lot of it tends to be fudging, tweaking and slight improvements as one goes along and it is difficult to find space for that vision piece, which I think is needed more.

I was very struck by the fact that it is 33 years since the carer's allowance scheme was designed and I thought about how different society was back to 1990. My family was a single-income household in 1990. My dad had a job and my mum was at home but in the economic reality of 1990 that was not unusual. For a lot of families, a one-income household was enough to make things stack up.

One could take this kind of means-tested view and say, "if they have enough under one income, they will be grand and mum was probably at home anyway." That situation is very different from the context in which we find ourselves now where if one partner has to step out of the workforce for whatever reason, that very often puts the household into financial difficulties.

I was struck by Ms Thyne's contribution. I live with a full-time musician and it is difficult because of the self-employment piece. As Ms Thyne has said, one does not generate one's own work and must go places for the work. Even that self-definition piece is important for somebody like Ms Thyne, who is a musician because that is how she defines herself, and you want to be able to define yourself as a musician and stack that sefl-definition on top of being a parent, a carer and not have those roles being mutually exclusive and not for one of those things to push out or preclude the other.

I was struck by the idea that what we are talking about is not really a social protection support. It is not a safety net and, as Professor Murphy said, it is not an income support. We are talking about an employment where somebody is working and providing a public good. We are valuing a public good at a scale of €20 billion across our society. I was struck by the thought that if someone sought to have a second employment and to be the second income in a household, we would never ask that person whether, as he or she was thinking of working in a bank, we could do a means-test first before he or she sought that employment. Consequently, it strikes me as strange to apply a means test where somebody is actually working and providing a valuable service to society. It seems strange to say we are going to means-test the person before we decide that is something we are going to allow him or her to do or allow him or her to benefit from.

There are many reasons to consider care as work at present, with demographics being the obvious reason. There are also wider conversations like digital disruption and what are the sectors of the economy where we cannot expect artificial intelligence to take over. I do not think digitisation is going to provide for Ms Thyne's son in the way that she can provide for her son. Unless we think about how we value care work within our society then we will to struggle to remake an economy that adequately provides for those caring needs into the future. That comes back to the vision versus incrementalism piece and whether we are really looking to the future.

Referendum debates always take on a life of their own. Very often they turn into debates about anything other than the actual wording of the amendment being put to the people. The forthcoming referendum offers us the opportunity to seriously talk about how we value the role of caring in society. What would our guests like to see in that debate? If it is an opportunity then how should we do as the people who hopefully will play a role in framing and leading the debate? What would our guests like to see us push for in terms of the discussion on the referendum?