Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail)
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Something I notice about social welfare theory is that there seems to be paranoia about how, if there is not an instant change in the system, someone might get a payment despite an increase in income. The working family payment works on a different principle. It takes someone’s income from last year. He or she can go off to work, earn whatever he or she wants and still get the payment for the following year. If someone improves his or her situation, he or she gets a bonus. What is the harm in that? It does not cost the State a significant amount of the greater budget. That extra bit of generosity does not cost much. Is there paranoia in the system about someone possibly getting a few euro – pounds, in the witnesses’ case – more than his or her income warrants in that immediate instant? Do we just keep adding to the bureaucracy to check that does not happen? In our case, a self-employed person gets the payment for a year unless he or she gets a job. If the person is a self-employed farmer, he or she gets farm assist, which is jobseeker’s allowance for a farmer, for the year. No matter what he or she earns, it will be the following year before it is adjusted. That adjusted payment stays for a year and so on. If claimants earn more income, is the system being driven by its own desire to get its share right away rather than being slightly delayed?

Mention was made of how people who could not read or write or work digitally could go to the jobs office.

However, what happens if the nearest jobs office is 60 km or 70 km away? That presents distance discrimination. Has that been an issue for people trying to access this in person? It seems to be a glib answer to be told to go down to the local community welfare office but to find that it is a huge distance away. It seems it could be four, five, six or seven years before a system like that would be introduced. My instinct would be that we would be better employed in making the system we have a lot better in the meantime, maybe with a long-term view of changing the system radically. However, that would not in itself solve a great many problems, whereas improving day-to-day life for people now within our current framework would make it a lot fairer. That would be a better approach. That is the fundamental question we face when it comes to this big bang approach as opposed to incrementally changing what we have.