Government denies role in pulling report

Social Protection Minister Joan Burton said she found it hard to see how the 44% of young parents on the dole were better off than if they were at work.

Ms Burton said her department’s research had it that most people claiming the dole were living on €188 per week.

She was responding to the withdrawn ESRI research carried out by Professor Richard Tol which said the additional costs of going to work made it an uneconomical decision, particularly for the parents of pre-school children.

A breakdown of the department’s assumptions showed that a family in comparative situations were €20,000 better off in work than on welfare.

However, this calculation was only based on cash benefits, while Prof Tol’s work looked at what had to be paid for to go to work, such as childcare and lunches.

Ms Burton denied there was any Government involvement in Tuesday’s decision by the ESRI to pull the working paper.

“Richard Tol and the ESRI obviously have issues with each other,” she said.

The ESRI said it withdrew the paper because its researchers, who are experts in the area, concluded that the analysis it contained was “seriously flawed”.

However, the author of the paper said that for all the debate on the methodology used, he had yet to be told his conclusion was incorrect.

“It’s 22 hours after the ESRI publicly claimed my work is methodologically flawed. Still waiting for someone to tell me what I did wrong,” he said.

Earlier Prof Tol, who has left the ESRI for the University of Sussex, said he would revise the paper and criticised the lack of suitable data for researching the issue in Ireland.

“There are of course serious issues with the data, because unfortunately in Ireland there’s no real data set that really goes to the heart of this, so we had to combine two sets of data that were collected for different purposes. But as far as I know, we’ve done that correctly,” he said.

This came as Sinn Féin deputy leader Mary Lou McDonald criticised the report as a “very shoddy” piece of work. She said the report was based on old data, had not been peer-reviewed, and was now being used by some to create the impression the unemployed were “living a gilt-edged lifestyle”.

She questioned whether the Government was cynically using the report “as part of a strategy to drive down welfare rates in the next budget”.

In response, Taoiseach Enda Kenny said he recognised many people were struggling and that he empathised with them. The Government’s priority, he added, was to deal with the “central issue” of getting people back to work.

However, he gave no assurances on the issue of welfare cuts, merely saying the Government would act in the country’s best interests.

He also denied suggestions of political interference leading to the report’s recall, saying he could not and would not stand over any such interventions by the Government in the work of an independent agency.