Professor Michael McMahon:

We made our view clear in the report and last year, though last year the untargeted nature was more understandable because we got to the budget at a time energy prices had just shot up. It was not obvious how we would target them or what mechanisms we had which could identify who to target them at. There are occasions when a blanket approach minimises the chance of missing someone needy at the cost of giving to some people who may not need it. That is regularly the case. A year has passed and the question is whether in that year more effort could have been made in Ireland and across Europe to figure out the ideal way to target these in case we decide we need them again. Energy prices have come back a bit but are still elevated over pre-Covid levels. We might ask if we could have tried to figure out a way to target them appropriately. This is an anecdote but there was a panel discussion about this last weekend and people said they get their €150 energy payments but are out of the house all day and live in a small apartment. It makes a huge dent in their bill but they do not need it. We do not look into the mechanisms of that but there is a question as to whether over the past year better attempts to figure out how to target the payments could have been made.