Dr. Joe Whelan:

Taking the Cathaoirleach's instruction under advisement, I do not want to repeat anything that has already been said. I will briefly address two of Deputy Ó Cathasaigh's points and bring them together. When he was asking his questions and setting out this thoughts, he spoke about the existence of a constituency of people among whom there is a belief that access to welfare should be hard and recipients should be forced to undergo institutional trials such that when they realise an entitlement, they have demonstrably shown that they have done everything they possibly could before they sought welfare. There are people who subscribe to that view. For them, this is how the welfare system should operate. The Deputy also spoke about when he first heard about the idea of participation income. These two issues can be brought together in a sense.

Without repeating what Dr. Dukelow said about participation income, one of its attractions as a policy is that, under such a scheme, conditions still attach to the receipt of welfare. Unlike a universal basic income, where people just get a basic income as a matter of right, there are responsibilities attached to a participation income, whatever they may be. Participation has to be defined. It could be defined very broadly to include things like caring and so on. However, the point is that there are still responsibilities and conditions attached to receiving a payment. When Professor Atkinson was writing about participation income, he saw it as a way of offsetting the view that conditions should attach to the receipt of welfare. If we think more broadly about what those conditions might be and what the strings of conditionality might consist of, participation income may go some way towards satisfying the constituency that feels people should have to do or prove something in order to receive welfare. Those two ideas can be brought together.