Dr. Ray Griffin:

I thank the Leas-Chathaoirleach. In terms of pull factor, it is much more complicated than that. We have been somewhat poorly served by a politics that has stigmatised welfare and the idea that there is high degree of cheating or gaming of the system by these strategic workless people who are trying to get benefits and such things. Statistically, we know we cannot establish that. Ireland is closer to a work cult than a dole cult, in that we have twice achieved a full labour market. Everybody I know and everybody I interview is overworked, overly busy and could do with a more modest role of work in their own lives.

When I say it is complicated, I mean it is related to services that are under pressure in health, housing and other social services that are part of the social welfare mix. We often address problems by issuing payments without attending to providing services. Certain elements, such as free school meals, are shown to have strong anti-poverty impacts and make the place a nicer country to live in. I am enjoying not making packed lunches on foot of it and all the hassle and attendant issues with that. Improving services is the answer to that, not politics making hay on stigmatising welfare and suggesting it.

There is a phenomenon we have identified called passing stigma, which is when a welfare recipient is deprived of a narrative of themselves as a good person, often have to produce that narrative of themselves and then say other welfare claimants are bad people. In this phenomenon, they say they are the good ones and other people are bad. When we interview unemployed people, they often have to do a lot of legitimacy work in which they construct themselves as a good person and then show there are other bad people. It is that kind of politics that sets us against us and universal payments are a way out of that because they remove the moral judgment of means testing.

On the second question, the Department of Social Protection is somewhat of a black box. There is a strong agenda in Irish research circles - led by the Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science and the new research agency - that we would have more engagement between the academic community and Departments and we would support policymaking. Certain pieces of infrastructure are needed to do this, such as Chatham House rules and science for society protocols. In general, it is quite difficult to interview anybody who works in the Department of Social Protection. None of them feel able to agree to an interview protocol, even though it has been ethically reviewed by our universities. That is a challenge for us. They are busy people and perhaps there is a cost to this participation that they do not recognise. That is certainly my experience and the experience of many of my students and other people in my SETU research team. The other witnesses may have their own views on that.