Professor Mary Murphy:

On what the Leas-Chathaoirleach was saying about tweaking versus the vision, having been involved in the welfare system for the past 40 years, I believe we can only tweak things for so long before we make the system so complicated that nobody can work it. That is what often happens with payments. We fall over ourselves making tweaks and it becomes very difficult for citizens to work their way through to the entitlement. Participation income came into vogue as an academic concept to try to move away from means testing as a general approach to how welfare could be administered. The National Economic and Social Council published a report last week entitled Is Ireland Thriving? It was very interesting and looked at a wide range of social indicator data. There is the idea of the vision we are trying to get to, what kind of society we are trying to create and how something like a participation income for family care could help us achieve that. Whether people are caring or receiving support and assistance to help them live lives they value and want to thrive in, we must ask what are the supports and income they need for us to make that happen. It is about that package and services and supports, as well as income, and we should not forget that.

Care, whether it is caring for, caring about or caring with, is part of our lives. This is about trying to take it out of a narrow view that it is about income support and finding a way of bringing care much more into the open and rewarding and making visible that care work which, as the Leas-Chathaoirleach said, is worth €20 billion overall. I see the referendum as an opportunity to have a debate about what kind of society we want, bring care, gender equality and the diversity and role of different types of families much more into the public view and get a much better understanding of how we see this developing and what kinds of services and supports carers need in order to be enabled in lots of different ways. The definition of care has to be expansive to take into account the variety of ways people engage with care and live their lives. Some people are adamant they do not want to be seen as recipients of care, but as people who need certain supports and assistance to live very valued lives. As such, we need to be careful how we talk about care, even in the context of the referendum, so it is understood to be as wide and enabling as possible for everybody to live an independent, thriving life. Participation has a part to play in the story of the vision we want for society.