Mr. Rónán Hession:

I am happy to deal with that. Some 330,000 children are getting the child support payment. That payment is an add-on to a primary payment. These are people who are already in receipt of a social welfare payment. This helps us to target it. You will find that most international systems have a mix and especially when it comes to child supports. There is a mix of the universal and targeted payments and there are also tax measures and other supports.

On the matter of the second tier of child benefit, we are in the early stages of the discourse around that. To some extent people have different pictures in their minds of what it involves. Some people will see it as getting a monthly payment and maybe some people will get a second line in the payslip, which is the targeted part. The ESRI has put out as a proposal that involves a kind of re-engineering of the working family payment, which is the payment paid to families who are doing at least about 19 hours a week. That involves quite a fundamental overhaul of a number of different payments, which would effectively roll the child support payment into a working family payment and make a number of other design changes. We are at the stage where we are exploring this. It is our job to make sure the Government is informed of a range of options. We certainly welcome the ESRI applying its thoughts to it and its proposals. It is quite complex. We had a number very productive discussions with the agency on it. There are a number of ways in which that could be targeted. One of the core questions at the start is who should benefit. On the universal payment, if you are targeting child measures, we have typically focused on those in receipt of the child support payment because we know they have already gone through a qualification process for the working family payment, which is what the Government has done in the budget this time around. Broadly speaking, that is the sort of target cohort. Then there are design choices about whether it is something that is part of the child benefit payment or if it is something else and whether it sits better with that type of overhaul the ESRI was talking about.