Dr. Ray Griffin:

I thank the Deputy for his questions and observations. While not wanting to give a history of the welfare state, the Victorian deservingness model was a version of means testing. Across Europe in the aftermath of wars, we introduced universal benefits to get out of the business of moralising. The welfare state has proved to be remarkable value in that it has kept peace in Europe and kept the wolf from the door for many families. In the 1930s in the UK there was the Britain is Hungry movement and all that big kind of debate leading up to the Beveridge report from which our system evolved. Universalism is a moment in which politics intervenes with the economic rationality and just imposes high-quality thresholds at the bottom. We have a politically timid system at the moment in which we feel it is not possible to do big things and it is not possible to reform things.

There are systems like universal credit, which has been a bit of a dumpster fire of an experience. It took a decade. There are an awful lot of negative issues associated with it on top of what was happening in the British welfare state. That would discourage politicians from doing bigger things.

However, we also had the experience of PUP which was a live experiment of a version of universal basic income. We learned that our Department of Social Protection was incredibly flexible, and had incredible institutional capacity to do big things quickly and effectively in a robust way. We were slightly surprised to discover that we could furlough 50% of the labour market quite cheaply. It is not an insignificant cost. If I had been asked before 2020 about universal basic income, I would have suggested that Ireland should have had a space programme first. However, the experience of PUP shows we can go to a much more universal system much more cheaply. Of course, it requires facing down Department of Finance people who will say it will cost a lot of money. The cost-benefit analysis of it shows that it depends on what is put into the cost-benefit analysis. All the costs are not assessed and, in particular, all of the benefits are not.

Regarding the second issue of means testing being negative taxation, the reason we have lumpy welfare is that the payments at the bottom are a calibration of what is needed to keep the wolf from the door for the most vulnerable people. A sliding scale has its attractions of integrating the income system with the welfare system. However, that has many other issues that exist just over the payments threshold of people on low incomes being subsidised and what that does to the labour market. There are a lot of moving parts to such a suggestion.

Regarding the third issue of how capital should be treated, capital is a word economists use and economists do not really understand that not all capital is equal. A family home or a 15-acre family farm which has no income but has huge significance in people's lives and identity and €40,000 worth of Kerry Co-op shares are very different things. In different ways across our system, we have an administrative system that is trying to recognise those differences. The appeals officer's report shows many issues with non-income bearing capital and whether it should be paid down. That is very much a political question about what kind of society we want and whether people should be able to keep a family home and assets intergenerationally, meritocracy and all those kinds of debates which are beyond me.

Over the past 20 or 30 years the systems for those who are employed and self-employed have converged and there should not be many distinctions between them. Just like distinctions on cohabiting, the State finds itself with lots of complicated boundary debates which would take a long time to unpick and to what end? Ideally, they should be treated the same as much as possible.

The final question was on seeking work. I can finally talk about the actual research we have done. We interviewed 158 people who are unemployed. They are incredibly thoughtful about the strategic and tactical trade-offs before them. Often the choice is to stay at home in a community with little work potential or to move and cut their caring responsibilities. Some people can make those choices; others cannot. Some people we interviewed made those choices and then could not sustain them. They may have had a commute that was too long and could not get back to an elderly parent or a child coming out of a crèche and it went wrong. The original construct of unemployment was not working and available for work. Seeking comes in later. The State is able to measure available and not working but cannot measure seeking. In the UK, they are monitoring 40 hours of job search, which is insane.