Dr. Ray Griffin:

I thank the Deputy for the questions. I suppose the issue is how to unscramble the egg. The choice is to tinker and revise in this regard or to renovate and make substantial changes. Providing universal coverage is always a political moment. We can think of iconic moments in politics, such as Aneurin Bevan creating a universal health system in the UK and facing down everybody who said it would not be possible and would not work, while in Ireland we have the cases of Noël Browne introducing the mother and child scheme and Donogh O'Malley introducing free secondary education. Typically, what we find is that plausible analysis can be done that gives an amount of money something like this is going to cost but it is not possible to capture the unintended benefits and uplift deriving from universal services.

There are hidden costs of managing means tests that we do not recognise. When we say 4% to 8%, we are not including the cost of running the appeals procedures or the High Court reviews. There are five High Court cases from 2022. I do not know if they were all to do with means testing. We do not know the ins and outs of these cases. There were 22 judicial reviews and 25,000 appeals in this context. The appeals office has 85 people working in it, and we would assume that 20% to 30% of appeals are related to means tests. There is then this extensive administrative undertaking in this regard. All this takes time and somebody is waiting at the end of it. When we blow out all this bureaucracy that slows things down and makes progress difficult and impossible, an incredible clarity often emerges that it was not very sensible to be doing it after the fact.

Moving from targeted payments that are means tested to universal payments introduces deadweight costs, including people getting the payments who do not quite need them or payments not being as targeted as they should be. Substantial sums of money, however, are still being given to the most needy and vulnerable in our community. We know this money cycles through the economy really quickly. It does not get hoarded or saved. It actually revitalises communities and has a very quick circular economic impact. We saw this particularly in the experience of PUP. The economic stimulus deriving from that payment was significant and slightly surprised all the modelling. This makes us wonder what is included in the analysis when it is said it is going to cost €300 million, €400 million or €600 million to do something. It is a demand-led service, so it is very unpredictable and the accuracy of these forecasts when we go back and look at them is very poor.

We should be doing much more evidential gaming of scenarios rather than putting an amount on them. I would believe the estimations more if they said what would be likely to happen if things went well or what the potential liability might be if things did not go well at these different ranges. We could then start to say we were feeding the political system to the point where it could make a strong decision. To unscramble the egg, therefore, is a political moment and I was very much taken by the observations of our previous Taoiseach when he left office, especially his observation that he should have been braver and done more. Tony Blair and Bill Clinton made the same comments. It is a common observation in politics regarding listening too much to advice and narrowing the window of potential.