Ms Susanne Rogers:

I live on the wrong side of that road. If that is the case, then I hope I will be the exception to the rule. Providing that bit extra for those who have nothing is not going to fuel inflation because this is just being able to buy the pint of milk or, as Mr. Nugent said, to go for a pint or a coffee every fortnight. It is not going to fuel inflation in the same way the pent-up savings during Covid-19 did. Everybody was getting new windows and garden work and so on. I absolutely do not believe it would drive up inflation.

We will be looking at the poverty piece for those in work, which has been pretty static, which, as was said, considering we are at full employment, is quite extraordinary. However, the Central Bank quarterly bulletin for 2024 talks about the gap between employment and actual hours worked. That is starting to diverge, so I do not know whether that has a part in it. I am not sure. One question that was not asked but I might answer anyway relates to one of the pushbacks to this is that if we lock in, then we are stuck with this system. We will have committed to it and we cannot afford it. My pushback on that would be that we lock in tax expenditures and we never revisit them.