Tommy Broughan (Dublin Bay North, Independent) | Oireachtas source

The Minister said before that there would be no drastic increases or decreases but looking at the record of the consumer price index, CPI, there were effectively deflationary years and years when there seemed to be very little increase in the CPI. Will the Department do any kind of impact assessments? When the Minister responded to my Sinn Féin colleague, Deputy Brady, on this subject she gave global figures but no indication of what it would be if it was not a €5 increase across the board.

This morning the Think-tank for Action on Social Change, TASC, published a report entitled Inequality in Ireland and Europe - Cherishing all Equally 2019 which once again highlighted that the lower four quartiles of the population get slightly over 20% of the national income and the key importance of social transfers, especially for lone parent families and many of our senior citizens. This is an area where the general proposal could be welcome but we need to be very careful about how we would implement it, especially given the fact that parts of the social welfare system, for example, the Christmas bonus, do not appear anywhere in the basic accounts. They are last minute decisions and in the past two years the Minister had to go back to the Minister for Finance to get €50 million more, I think, for the disability allowance budget to make sure there was enough money for the year. When will the Department publish something in this area?

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