Mr. Ciarán Lawler:

The decision of the Government at the time was to implement a flat-rate increase of €5 per week across all social welfare payments. There was no policy on indexation, nor is there an official policy on indexation or benchmarking at this point. We are looking at it for pensions, as I have said, but the policy in recent years has been to implement flat-rate increases and increases for targeted payments such as the living allowance or qualified child allowances.