Ms Louise Bayliss:

We would be slightly different in that, while we appreciate the talk about child benefit, the second tier payment and all of the positive things about €770 million being invested into a second tier child benefit, there are issues around it in the current model. One of the positives would be that there would be no cliff edge, where when a child turns 14, the parent suddenly loses income. All of that would be gone. There would be no loss of access to a payment if a parent suddenly worked too many hours. All of that is really positive and that aspect of the model is to be welcomed.

However, the tax and working strategy paper and the ESRI report have highlighted the fact that 40,000 children would benefit, some of them up to 50%, but 100,000 children would lose up to 16% of their income. One of the flaws we see in the current model is that it does not use the MESL research that highlights the higher cost of older children. It just puts them all at the same level. When we know younger children are well-supported by social protection and older children are not, the idea that we would get rid of that research would concern us. Given the fact that 100,000 children would be worse off, it would be a dangerous road to go down, to invest €772 million in a process where we are not sure who those 100,000 children are. Looking at the tax and working strategy paper and the data from the ESRI, the majority - not all, because some of them are in the higher incomes where they might be receiving carer's allowance and half rate child support payment - but the majority of children who are losing out are in the lower three income deciles. While it is great to have that conversation, before we would introduce something like that, we would need to do deep research and make sure and identify who those 100,000 children are and make sure we are not making the situation worse for some children.

I agree with Dr. O'Connor that it is great to have a model but we really need to be careful that we do no harm first.