Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)
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I will comment briefly on that. When Mr. Chopra headed the troika team in Ireland, he introduced a terminology into public policy that has been universally adopted now, which is evidence-based policy making. All my discussions with him were about evidence-based policy making. When I arrived in the Department, some of our interlocutors had the State pension and free travel very much in their sights, as well as various other things particularly to do with older people. Mr. Chopra always talked about evidence-based policy. I would agree with an amount of what the Deputy said. Maybe the way we could address it is to say that departmental programmes - and consequently the measurement of their subsequent performance - should be evidence-based. In other words, what outcomes were set and what did they achieve?

There is quite a difficulty concerning financial measurements but only if one does not have a social policy achievement measure. In something such as social welfare, for example, it is easy to cite the New Zealand or Australian trend, which is basically saying that everything in social welfare should be means tested.

If one has people contributing to a contributory old age pension scheme, that is fine, but one should move to basing pension payments on means such that if somebody who has contributed is fortunate enough to have higher means, one would give consideration to this and move away from universalism. The most outstanding examples of universalism in Ireland are the contributory bases linked with the social insurance fund and, obviously, child benefit. Some of the schemes in New Zealand base everything on means testing, about some of which I have my doubts. Universalism has a very important role to play, particularly in the case of income structures for persons in retirement who, by and large, cannot work again or avail of work easily and, therefore, cannot influence their income hugely. In respect of the State's role in recognising the importance of services and income support for children, in some states that income support is provided through tax mechanisms. In that context, there must be some qualifications about the numbers such that it is about the policy behind them.