Ms Camille Loftus:

I will address some of the more technical aspects and I might invite some of my colleagues to supplement my answer. There are a number of overlapping themes in the questions and I will try to address them it that way.

There is a question about universality, both whether it is good or bad. From the End Child Poverty Coalition's perspective, we are strongly in support of a universal child income support. It is critically important for the State to deliver that kind of support in respect of all children.

There are questions about distribution. It is one of the reasons we have supported a second-tier payment, which is to maintain the bedrock of universality but to deliver a higher level of support to the families which would need it most. That is the basic theory behind it.

Specifically, in answer to Senator Marie Moloney's question, if there are concerns about very high earners receiving child benefit, the simple solution to that, without getting into overall complex mechanisms, is to apply higher tax rates to very high earners. If I were a very high earner, in the absence of having any children whatsoever, I would not consider it at all unreasonable that I should pay more tax in order to contribute to the welfare of children who did not get raised in as good a circumstance as I did. That is a fair social trade-off.

On making work pay, I strongly endorse the comments by the women's council. Child poverty is strongly related to joblessness in Ireland, and it was so even during the so-called boom years. There are many who are concerned about that.

Senator Healy Eames asked does more welfare support make work less attractive. The point of the family income supplement is that it addresses that specific problem. That is why FIS is such an important payment in the system.

The second-tier payment, in and of itself, does not deliver additional support to those who are in work. It treats all income the same. FIS states, "If you are in work, we will deliver a higher level of support to you because it is critically important that work pays".

I would broaden out this. If we look at the changes that have happened in social protection over the past couple of years and look at changes to both jobseeker payments and lone parent payments, in each instance those changes have reduced the return from participating in employment for those who are unemployed. They have made the transition from welfare to work less attractive than it was in the past. The answer from the policy system always was that FIS is there to ensure that work always pays. The alarming aspect about these proposals is that they propose to withdraw that very support.