Dr. Nat O'Connor:

To start with, there is a huge amount that is known about poverty. There is a huge amount of academic research. There is also a lot of research done by the 31 member organisations of the Community Platform and by other charities such as the Society of St. Vincent de Paul and the Vincentian MESL Research Centre. Therefore, we do know an awful lot about why people are in poverty. I just counted but there is 141 footnotes in the report, which will bring you to various pieces of research and annual reports of our organisations. It will also give the individual stories of people who are living in poverty. There is a wealth of stuff there. Take, for example, people who are lone parents. We know that to afford a house today, whether you are renting or paying a mortgage, you need one and a half salaries or two salaries or more. That is the reality of life in Ireland. If you have somebody who is on a single income who is doing his or her best and who is a lone parent, such a person simply cannot afford housing in Ireland. You need that extra support. We can measure how much it is because we can measure rents and how much income we are giving lone parents, and there is a gap. We leave a gap when we calculate all the payments we give to lone parents. It is as simple as that. We look at the huge report that was done by the Department on the additional costs of living with a disability. It is a very detailed report. Depending on different types of disability, it just costs people more to go about their day-to-day living. You need money to cancel out the disability before you can get started. We had organisations calling for a cost-of-disability payment but it has not been progressed. I could go on in depth but I will not. The Deputy gets the picture. We have a huge amount of research available, which we would be very happy to share in terms of that.

On the Deputy's other question about meeting the Department, the Community Platform is a member of the community and voluntary pillar, which is a vestige of the old social partnership social dialogue structures and has meetings with the Department on a quarterly basis. There is access to officials. There are opportunities to go in and present information and to hear about what the Government is doing on different payments. There is good and bad in it. There are good opportunities in that if the Government is changing a payment or an application process, we can give input and know it is read and taken seriously but they are ultimately not the policymakers. It is at the ministerial level that the direction is set and it is at the whole-of-government level. Although it is the responsibility of the Department of Social Protection, poverty really is an all-of-government responsibility because we have separate Departments for disability and for housing with another one for transport and we need to get all of those involved, and more, such as healthcare and education and so on. All of those costs-----