Dr. Ray Griffin:

I thank the Deputy for his questions. He used a number of metaphors for the social welfare system. The first involved a bicycle and related to my reference to perpetual calibration. The Department of Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Reform will always prefer benefits to be means tested. It thinks of the annual social welfare bill as involving a set amount of money with which the State is trying to accomplish something. That takes us straight away into very targeted approaches. The bricolage method by means of which we assemble our welfare state each year through a process of adjustment and refinement means that we end up with an overly calibrating system. We need to consider the people at the other end of the system trying to conduct their lives. Our welfare state is a very stable actor in people's lives but it has that agitation element of continually changing.

The same is true when we look at the second metaphor, which is the buckaroo metaphor. I like that metaphor. The chief appeals officer's annual report presents 65 case studies that give a real insight into how the system works. Many of the case studies deal with new assessments or something that has changed somebody's means. Now the person at the other end of this is in difficulty in their lives to a sufficient extent that he or she raises an appeal. The issue of deprivation emerges very quickly in such cases.

The third issue is individualisation. Where I see this most apparent is in the State's approach to Schrodinger relationships. People are sometimes married and sometimes not, sometimes cohabiting and sometimes not. This approach goes on between Revenue and the Department of Social Protection. What does that approach do? It intervenes in a very strange way in people's coupling and their modes of having relationships. It means the State is now very curious as to whether somebody is a dependant of somebody else. That is very patriarchal. It comes from the vestiges of a time when there were male breadwinners in marriage and from a certain disapproval of a lot of the ways people have contemporary relationships. The State should not be involved in that type of moralising. If the referendum on care showed anything it is that we are in a really difficult spot when the State is trying to produce a precise definition of a relationship for the purposes of establishing a dependence.

On the issue of non-claiming and under-claiming, we previously thought of this as an urban-rural issue. There was a hidden form of rural poverty that came from seeing people as being self-reliant and quite distant from State services. Those services were not in front of them. There was also a certain local stigma attached to being known in a community as a person claiming welfare. That is now well gone. The issue is really that we spend a great deal of time on the economics of our welfare system and working out the thresholds, bounds, rules and laws. We do not think enough about the experience of somebody walking into an office and seeking help without knowing how to navigate the system. A great deal is being done in this regard. The Department of Social Protection advertises the benefits that are available and we know those advertisements work. There is a rise in claimants and queries about claims as people become more aware of what is available.

Another issue is to do with the actual front doorsteps of the social welfare offices. There was a movement away from the Department of Social Protection brand that had the logo of a person holding a bird. Many people knew that logo. We then had a move to the kind of vague and vacuous branding of Intreo, with the up-pointing arrow. That represented a withdrawal of the promise of social security. The Department of Social Protection is there to protect people. Intreo just means nothing. That change was made consciously in 2011 and 2015. I see a certain number of offices now being rebranded with a very officious Department of Social Protection logo in the official Government green. We are moving to a kind of statist architecture. That change is not particularly thinking about vulnerable citizens and their experience of walking into an office and trying to navigate their way through the welfare state. We end up spending a fortune on third-sector organisations to coach people on how to access welfare benefits.

In my research group, we have informally looked at the kinds of advisory systems people use online. We are looking at researching this more formally. A lot of people go onto boards.ie or Reddit, for example, seeking information. They ring a TD or ask a councillor. They go to the Society of St. Vincent de Paul or a local charity. They get coached in the technique of making a successful claim and how to tell and perform their story in a certain way to ensure success. Those people are of course entitled to those payments. The point is that our system is that bit too complicated for people to navigate.

In one of the research modules we did, we interviewed 36 of the most vulnerable people who were workless. They could not identify the difference between a teacher and a person working in the Department of Social Protection. They were all "the Government" to them. How those people navigate the welfare state is interesting. They typically do it using third-sector organisations. None of this is to say that the 6,000 people working in the Department of Social Protection are not effective. It is just that they are worried about the other parts of the system, making sure the entitlements system is robust and ensuring the paperwork is filed. They have 101 other concerns. It is really important that we create more space to think about the user experience of accessing welfare.