Mr. Se?n Moynihan:

I appreciate the comments. What the Deputy said is really interesting. TDs are really aware of what we experience on the ground whereby people do not know what they are entitled to. As Mr. O'Connor listed, approximately eight payments are means-tested and, therefore, people have to go through eight different systems with all the different criteria.

The other issue is that some of these things happen by accident. Nobody set out to design the system. We welcome the fact that a deep dive is being done on this. We need to create a vision of what we actually want from this and then unify a situation on that.

The way the system seems to look at things is a bit like any grant whereby we are always worried about the 3% of people who might try to get something they are not entitled to rather than getting people what they are actually entitled to in the simplest, most cost-effective way. For us, 50% of the people we work with are over 75 years of age, roughly around 50% live on their own and the majority are only on the State pension. The reality is that because of that age, we have an awful lot of people who are trying to deal with these complex systems, possibly where they also have frailty and health issues or where they are on their own and do not necessarily have the supports to do that. It is about having an overhaul where we unify how to do that to reduce the volume of means-testing and ultimately go for that.

On the taxation of universal benefit, obviously, if certain people are over a certain threshold of income, then it falls into that.

That is a complex question as well, but the main focus here is to unify and simplify how and why we do the means test and what we are trying to achieve.