Joe O'Brien (Dublin Fingal, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I do not want to get knotted up in a hypothetical case but in that situation Senator Murphy would be entitled to a range of payments in respect his family members as well. On what the Deputy presented there, we would not be comparing like with like.

I agree with the Deputy on value for money. It is extraordinary that not only those on RSS but people on CE and Tús come out every week and do what they do for the financial compensation they get. It is obvious that those involved in any of these schemes generally are not in it for the money and they are getting something else out of it. For CE, sometimes that is the training and the pathway that produces. For others, it is being involved in their community and wanting to contribute. That is clearly something that people want to do. However, I will not argue with the Deputy on the value for money that we get out of RSS, and the other schemes as well.

Effectively, there is no quota or limit. If demand shoots up for the RSS, we will facilitate it. It is not a constraint on anybody finding a place on the scheme at present. There is no threat to the scheme. The Deputy is talking about the hypothetical case of the RSS disappearing and what it would leave but, to reassure people in case they got the wrong end of the stick, there is absolutely no threat to that. In fact, some of the changes going forward will ensure that there is a bright future for the scheme.

The review examined the context as well. The starkest, most challenging context in all of this is the situation faced by small farmers and fishers in that it is increasingly economically less viable for small farmers and fishers to stay on the land. RSS can play a small part in helping out but the key recommendation coming out of this that will cut through that stark and difficult context is the rural dwellers pilot. What we are proposing, basically, for the first time, which is quite a dramatic change, especially if it progresses, is that we are decoupling the connection with the farm or the trawler in the pilot. That will open it up to I know not how many more people but the eligibility pool will be multiplied exponentially. That could change the scheme dramatically going into the future as well. On the rural dwellers pilot, there will be 250 places initially. We will assign seven of them per IB. We will see how that goes after six months. I suspect we might need to do some reallocation. IBs in both members' parts of the country might be able to fill a lot more than seven but we can reallocate based on that. That rural dweller recommendation will change RSS dramatically if we can feed it into the wider scheme, learn from the pilot and bring the learnings from the pilot into the mainstream scheme.

In terms of the initial policy purpose of the RSS, the Deputy will know that better than me. It has evolved over time. The way we frame it now is that it is not necessarily prioritising activation but recognising underemployment in that for a lot of small farmers it is a part-time job, they want and need to do something else and, as I said, it can act as an incentive to keep people on the land. The main benefit that I see people getting out of it is the social connection with the community. In Senator Murphy's part of the world, which was one of the first RSS projects that I visited, it was clear there were a lot of single older men who relied on it has their outlet or one of their main social outlets. It has got huge importance in that regard as well. Policy-wise, it has more diverse strands outside of activation or the narrow activation way of looking at things.