Dr. Se?n Healy:

We have done much work on that and have made concrete proposals on what a package of targeted initiatives would look like. The shorthand version is that most of the initiatives there at the moment that are targeted for such outcomes or groups, such as people with disabilities, ill people, carers and a range of others, would stay in place. Every time we have proposed a basic income and done the work on costing it, those costs are in there. We have been making basic income proposals for 30 years and have never made one that did not have those initiatives in there. A person who is long retired but was a very good civil servant in her day and did many things in many Departments said at a meeting once that she was happy because at the time she was running the section in the Department of Social Protection that would not be closed down as a result of the introduction of a basic income. The point being it was the section dealing with all those kinds of issues. If there are such issues, they can be targeted. I do not think there is any great problem with it. They are targeted in the present system and we are already paying for them. We should probably be paying more for most, if not all, of them. That is a separate issue. If we want to jump from partial to full services of these targeted kinds, in the comparison we should put that on both sides of the analysis.