Marc Ó Cathasaigh (Waterford, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

There are so many things hanging off the back of the horse that maybe there is a need for a reset. Of course, that is what the Department is doing by examining the means tests. I agree with the point about universalism. That is where we should be going.

I also agree on the point that there should be grace when a person has to interact with the social protection system.

It is important to acknowledge that there is a constituency out there, which I do not belong to, that believes that social welfare payments should be difficult to access. We talked about issues such as stigmatisation. Some people are happy with the idea that social protection recipients have some sort of moral failing. I do not subscribe to that view at all but that perception is codified. Thankfully, I think it is changing. Many of the changes in the last decade or so, in particular, have moved away from that viewpoint. However, at a certain level, it is still stitched in and there is a constituency out there for it. As I said, it is not something I subscribe to and I think we should be moving away from it. Nevertheless, if we are to have an honest and real discussion about the social protection system, we need to be aware of that.

I could ask any number of questions. Dr. Dukelow spoke about anomalies in the lone parent payments. I ask her to expand on that point. The idea of participation income is one I am coming across more often. How is this different from one of the other big ideas, universal basic income, UBI? The artist basic income was referred to as well. That is not quite a UBI. It is more like an income guarantee. There are a lot of ideas in roughly the same space and I find it difficult to pick out the differences between the two in terms of which policy direction I would prefer to see the State moving in.

I have not come across the earnings disregard for self-employed people moving to the jobseeker's transitional payment. I ask Dr. Dukelow to elaborate on this. Perhaps all of the witnesses would like to comment on the idea of treating each person as an individual within the social protection system. I very much agree that we should be moving in that direction. There is a paternalism stitched into the system and we should try to pick it out.

Dr. Griffin often speaks about the issues of under-claiming and not claiming and how the State could be better about reaching out to people and explaining their entitlements to them. This comes back to my point about there being a constituency that does not really want to link people with their entitlements. If somebody has an entitlement, the State should be proactive about reaching them, simplifying the access points and letting people know that this is part of the contract of being a citizen of this State. There should be no negative connotation to the word "entitlement". I ask the witnesses to comment on how they could see that happening. Conscious of the fact that people working the Department do not have the luxury of stepping off the bicycle, how can we make this happen in real time so that we have more grace and kindness in the system?