Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

First, we should never forget, farm assist was actually meant to be a family income supplement for self-employed farmers. It was not meant to be the equivalent to the dole, but it is a jobseeker's allowance scheme and that is a challenge. I never look at schemes out of a historic prism, I look at their effect at the moment. How are they working? How do you change the rules?

We are doing this exercise right across means-testing and all the different schemes. There are two ways of approaching it. We know if we had a clean sheet we would not have the systems we have now. It would be very different. We are, as they say, where we are. What we have to do is look at the long term but say how we, in integral steps, get to that long term. In other words, we must change year in year out to get to universal basic income or whatever. I do not ever believe we are going to get there in one big bang. There are too many imponderables about that.

We can point to the idea of everybody having a basic income and then paying a tax on everything they earn above that. Now how do we get there? One of the basic ways is to actually deal with means testing in the present because the basic income never suggests 50% or 60% tax, it always suggests 30% tax so we have to go somewhere between where we would like to be and where we can get to in the short term. The discussion has been very useful, we have all learned a lot here.