Ms Gr?inne Loughran:

On the disability allowance and non-contributory pension, these means tests use different rules to assess capital, which does not make sense. In terms of small farmers - I am from a rural background myself so I know all about this - the vast number of anomalies within the system is a function of the system that has been designed on a piecemeal basis. It was not designed with people in mind but was based on numbers, bits of income and a nod to how we enable people to access the system, particularly older people.

In terms of older people with savings, as I mentioned earlier, about half of older people living alone have savings of less than €8,100 and the cohort of people with which we work are generally in that lower income group. When we retire, and as our money goes down, suddenly we might need somebody to, say, clean the gutters or do a bit of painting when previously we could have done that ourselves, so housing standards will go down.

On social housing, the drop in income upon retirement is one of very few income drops during our lifetime that we can plan for as we know about it in advance. We do not know whether we will get sick or something will happen and we will need to move jobs. Retirement is something that we can plan for but we are not planning for it, particularly in terms of housing and access to social housing. People will know in advance of their retirement that they are renting and will be wondering what they are going to do in four or five years' time but we are not changing social housing eligibility to address that and to enable people to plan for that. This is an issue we have previously mentioned to the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage and we need to take it into account going forward.