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THE PRESENT SOCIAL welfare system is not working.
It was designed for a different era, to provide income security for the relatively small numbers of people who became temporarily unemployed from standard jobs. Efforts to patch it up in response to new needs have been piecemeal.
We need a proactive new system, building on the old system’s principles of security and social solidarity, but far more inclusive. Basic financial security should be a right for all members of society. A system that could achieve this is universal basic income (UBI), sometimes called a citizens’ income or dividend.
UBI is a regular and unconditional income from the state to every member of society, whether they engage in paid work or not. UBI replaces social welfare payments, child benefit and the state pension as we currently know them. It also extends to all those who currently receive no income from the state. Ideally, a UBI would be sufficient for each person to have a frugal but decent lifestyle without supplementary income from paid work.
UBI would bring into the security net all those not served by the current system: casual and short-contract workers who get no or limited sick pay, holiday pay or pension rights; self-employed people and business owners; those doing valuable unpaid care and other work, which adds value to society and economy.
Currently, those receiving welfare are badly served by the system: if they take paid work, especially low-paid or temporary, they often lose out financially, in a ‘benefits trap’. With UBI, there would always be a financial incentive for people to earn a taxable income, should a job be available. Employers would also welcome the ending of the benefits trap.
For those in sporadic or seasonal employment, UBI would eliminate the need to sign on and off and the payment delays that often occur.
The possibilities for welfare fraud would be minimised, with everyone playing by the same rules in a simpler system. This would also eliminate the current bureaucracy and intrusive scrutiny of claimants’ circumstances.
Running a business would be a different kind of experience. The income from it would be a top-up to a UBI. People would be free to try out business ideas, and the businesses would be viable as long as they made some small profit. They might even be able to carry losses for a short time while the business got established. There would be no harm done if the business failed, because the people involved would have their UBI to fall back on. It would also allow social entrepreneurs, who are not motivated by profit, to thrive.
UBI is a necessary part of any coherent state strategy for fostering private-sector business and entrepreneurship in the future. By providing basic securities for those wishing to start a business, it would create a supporting scaffold on which enterprise, creativity and inventiveness can flourish.
All employees would get increased bargaining power (individual and collective) within their jobs, because they would not be reliant on income from work to supply basic needs. Those who were dissatisfied with their type of work or with their work conditions would have better chances to negotiate other ways to live and work.
Young people, who currently face a very precarious future, would have much more meaningful choices and possibilities available if they had a UBI. Pressures to emigrate for financial reasons would be reduced. Basic financial security opens up possibilities for creativity, employment, entrepreneurial and educational pursuits and voluntary work.
UBI would make low-paid work more financially viable than at present, since the pay would be a top-up to the basic income. A great deal of caring, artistic and political work is low-paid, but of direct social benefit. If a low-paid job were also dead-end work, a person would have a genuine exit possibility. Anybody, in any kind of paid work (high- or low-paid), who considered the work personally, socially or environmentally harmful, would have improved choices about staying or going.
UBI would also make shorter hours in paid work financially viable for greater numbers of workers. If more people chose shorter hours of paid work, this would create employment opportunities for others.
It is possible to pay for UBI in Ireland, with our existing revenue system. It would replace almost all existing social welfare provisions (top-ups would be put in place for people with special needs), so the amount currently spent on welfare is immediately available. Employers would make a social-resources payment, to replace the present employer’s PRSI. The rest would come from an increase in income tax, which would be paid on all personal income over and above the UBI.
Talk of increased income tax generates strong reactions, usually negative. But most people ignore the fact that the extra revenue taken in tax would be returned as UBI. In other words, the extra tax we would pay to finance basic income would be offset by the UBI received.
UBI would undoubtedly benefit some people more than others. Those who would benefit most are the most vulnerable in the current work-welfare system: people doing valuable unpaid work, those caught in the ‘benefits trap’, people in precarious employment, the self-employed and young people. It would increase the contribution made by those who are already very well off. But if the well-off did fall on hard times, the UBI would provide basic financial support, without welfare applications or delays.
There are other options for funding UBI, which may become possible in the future. Right now, however, any government that makes a priority of basic financial security for all could afford to introduce it.
UBI is not a panacea, but one essential element of investment in a resilient and positive future for all. It would increase everybody’s capacity to cope with financial shocks and uncertainties and would improve general quality of life, while supporting many different kinds of work, with or without pay. This kind of social inclusion would foster solidarity and tolerance and reduce the resentment, divisiveness and cynicism that can occur when people experience wildly different levels of security. Increased social inclusion creates conditions for greater civic participation and deeper democracy.
Anne B Ryan is a lecturer at the Department of Adult and Community Education, NUI Maynooth, and a member of BIEN Ireland. BIEN Ireland is the Irish network for developing awareness of UBI. To find out more, email basic.income@nuim.ie. You can also read more at Social Justice Ireland and at basicincome.org.
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I’d settle for just decent coverage!!!
It appears like Eircom is going to miss the proverbial bus as their roll out of fibre broadband is very slow.
4G… The way to go.
4G isn’t fairing well in London. It’s leaving customers unable to receive calls.
@Antonov. eMobile, mentioned in the article, is Eircoms mobile service
Meteor is owned by eircom
Yes that’s great news altogether for people living in urban areas… When will there be a decent connection in the country though?
Hate to break it to ya but this was posted last night …eircom (meteor’s parent company) were first to the party! http://www.siliconrepublic.com/comms/item/34307-eircom-to-launch-first-4g-s
Eircom also own Meteor network
I took a look at Meteor’s site this morning. For €29.00pm on the 4g network you get
Unlimited calls
Unlimited Text
1GB of data
Is this 1GB per month? If it is that’s an absolute joke. Why offer a highspeed service and restrict it’s usage so much?
This country has never managed a proper 3g rollout anyway so I won’t be paying for 4g for the next few years for sure.
@Patrick Shelton: This story was updated this morning, but was originally published last night, as stated at the top and bottom of the article.
But what is the actual speed you pay for?
Sorry @Nicky Ryan , I see i should have put @Antonov as my comment is actually in reply to his “It appears like Eircom is going to miss the proverbial bus” & NOT a comment on the actual story you’ve written here. If you look closely at the comment tree you can see my comment is in the reply section as is yours.Cheers.
1gb is plenty what are you plannin to do download movies? Iv never gone over 500mb.
It’s so fast this comment is from the future
Ironically this video will not load for me. Feckin 3G..
3G speeds brushed under the carpet.
I have unlimited data with emobile yet 3g drops every single time to edge connection at much reduced speed.
Im only short of climbing the mast with phone in hand.
4g is going to disappoint a lot when they realise its not going to deliver.
There should be a ? over Donegal…. It depends on which way the wind is blowing.
It will still suffer from the same congestion problems as 3G. That 50 Megs will quickly become 8……Google 4G UK performance.
That’s nothing…..wait till you see how fast Meteor customer service disappoint you.
As far as I can see, EnolaStraight, it’s never as fast as any network says!
Incredible. This is a good thing but the comments are full of moaners – typical irish response.
Mane because they know it’s just a faster 3G – with the same inherent problems? How many users were accessing that tower at the time? 1? 2? 20?
How bout ye get 3G working all over the country first? Can’t wait to get out of this contract!!
They really should has used the same phone model on each to show a true comparison
True, but the HTC One S on the right would be capable of essentially the same speeds as the Samsung on the left.
You’d think the guy in the video would know the difference between MEGABITS and MEGABYTES. I definitely want a 50 megabyte connection, but we’re probably some time away from that.
True, but it’s quite an easy mistake to make, I find myself doing it sometimes and I’ve worked in IT for over a decade. I guess it’s because we’re so used to talking in MB, not Mb
If you’re going to be pedantic you might as well be correct, speeds are measured in Mb/s
It’s megabit, not megabyte.
You’ve just reduced 4G by a factor of 8!!!! Shame on you.
You mean mega con?!
What I would give for a 3G signal or even a H±. Get that right first lads before you start rolling out 4G.
I live near a cell tower in the US. 4G is what we use for everything. It’s very fast. We can stream video with no problems.
Of course it’s 30 odd megs a second, isn’t your mans phone the only one on the network?! Wait until 40000 customers are watching cat videos at the same time and check the shpeed then.
Hope your sales department got the cash up front for the ad.
Still prefer dial up, the anticipation of waiting for that jpeg image to load. Fantastic. And as for movies at least 3 to 5 hours for a cam copy off a VHS recording device which was then under pixelated. Good times good timex.
Is there a data cap or
Fair usage catch on meteor 4g with that
Kind of speed you would use up 2Gb I get with O2 a couple of days. I know it’s only a launch but it’s pretty pathetic coverage.
Take a look at the meteor site. The caps are pathetic. 1GB, 4GB or 6GB caps per month depending on the plan you choose.
If they would improve HSDPA it would be money better spent.
I would settle for 3G in Donegal. At the moment my download on 3G is 0.17 and upload is 0.23.
…..Loading
20mbps dl and 10 upload at grafton street
Those speeds are already available on existing 3G/hsdpa networks.
Those speeds are available on existing networks but LTE development will allow for even greater speeds on the new network over time that 3G won’t be able to achieve. It is only the beginning of the service after all.
In theory yes, in practice no, Have spent some time working around grafton street to test with various customers on meteor.
My 3G is sometimes faster than our fixed line broadband. And my uploads are always faster.. This is no indication that the speeds are great, just that our landline is so pathetically slow (4mb down and 0.3 up!!)
Yup…. Dsl is dead.
It cant compete with the cheaper cost of wireless roll-out.
Pathetically slow??? There’s a lot of people who can only dream of having those kinds of speeds.
Jude, I used to live about a mile away and had WiMAX, I got 8mb from WiMAX on occasion..
Where I am now is right beside some businesses – but out of WiMAX coverage, so we had to go fixed line, and the fixed line is slower than 3G.
I should point out – I am in Dublin, where allegedly e-fibre has been rolled out..
Moan, whinge, #%%#%****, moan, groan.. Fu****g whinge
Cant wait to get away from meteor i live near lucan and dongle keeps dropping to 2g have to drive nearly to rathcoole for it to switch back to 3g its a joke dont go near meteor they dont give a shit when u ring either !!
Feckinbrilliantstuffcan’twait….
Such random roll out, ok I get dublin, but athlone, Carlow??
Why shouldn’t some where other than Dublin get it first?
Sometimes you want to roll out services in smaller places so that you can experiment with them.
How much extra per month ?????
Wonder if that test was run close to a mast
It was tested at the Eircom/Meteor headquarters at Heuston South Quarter in Dublin 8.
So right under a mast with nobody else on the network at the time, so the results are as good as a condom with a tear in it.
Spot on, one user and right under the mast (inverse square law), no matter what laws of physics the marketing dept likes to ignore it will always come back to bite them. These kinds of “tests” are strictly controlled and basically rigged to get gullible journalists to print this sort of story and raise expectations which simply cannot be delivered…sure indeed you can drive at 80Mph along the M50 but just try it at rush hour or most times during the day…
Don’t forget we had to suffer through 3G demonstrations of 42Mb/s too when it was launched
Hi Eamonn, we will be following this article up with more detailed speed tests later. As I said, it was a sneak peek.
Nicky…that’s great but a fairer test would be to repeat the speedtest in a year or so when the network gets busy and then out in the sticks somewhere:) Perhaps even a few 100 metres from the mast….
I’ve written about this regularly and extensively on http://www.irelandoffline.org
Yep, that’s exactly what we were thinking of.
And how many arms and legs will they be charging for a ridiculously low amount of data?
ALL of them.
It’s not even well advertised on their (emobile/meteor) websites that it’s available or what you need to do to get it!
4g is been rolled out at a snails pace in comparison to other countries.
Tis hard to get even 1g in rural areas never mind 4g.Sort this out first I say
No yhey are right to offer service to the majority of population first. They are a private company and must do what’s best for business.
Cool, so now I will have NO 2G, 3G & 4G coverage, as well as NO land line broadband where I live.
Time to move?
Carcu, your crap internet coverage doesn’t seem to impede your ability to come on here and spout negative rubbish about everything positive happening in this country.
Well done to Eircom for launching first.
So what? Move
So Eircom win the nonsense race to get LTE ‘launched’ first. The prize is a raft of breathless puff pieces (see above) from the non-tech media, repeating silly claims that bear no resemblance to reality on an operational network with real customers.
Haven’t we been here before?
Mick
And we will be here again, and again and again, mostly because of contention I grant you.
LOL. This coverage map is a JOKE. I regularly travel from Dublin to Sligo. There is NO WAY I have 3G all the way. I have 50% of the time at best
Does this I be frapped with bill pay …this may cost extra I hope not!
Can’t wait
Bit of an unfair test, surely they should be identical phones so that all of the components are identical.
Saying that, it will be quicker than 3G up until everyone is on Netflix etc. and it’ll be right back down to that annoying loading icon
That’s true, but the HTC One S on the right would be capable of essentially the same speeds as the Samsung on the left.
That must be the worst gif I’ve ever seen (sorry)!
I’m sorry. Here’s a better one: http://31.media.tumblr.com/0b486b5c371060f2e3f66450b245c8ab/tumblr_msgpzcgRb51rjjjkoo1_400.gif
What a load of nonsense and a most unfair comparison! Currently there are NO consumers on 4G so in effect it’s an empty network so all the available bandwidth s “dedicated” to one phone.
Mobile is a shared medium, eg shared amongst all users of the cell site so with one user you will get all the bandwidth, with 10 users 1/10 of the bandwidth and so on, (this is an over-simplistic explanation) so with 10 user you will get 4Mb/s just like the 3G phone.
This is standard misinformation please don’t be fooled by these unfair comparisons!
Once consumers start to use the network speeds will drop off to exactly the same as 3G (Thanks to Comreg)
As soon as my contract is up, I’m leaving eMobile for Vodafone, 4G or no 4G. eMobile are unreasonable, slow, incompetent and rude!
Woulddnt touch meteor with his…
4G already working great in South Africa , ah sure lads send more taxpayers money over to them God love them, penny for the black babies , and we have no proper coverage , E everywhere and no sig, ha ha.
Of course the speeds are great with a single user connected a few metres from the transmitter, in a controlled environment.
Vodafone Ireland have also made their 4G announcement today. Happy days!
http://www.siliconrepublic.com/comms/item/34303-vodafone-to-offer-4g-data/
Let’s hope the 4G works because the 3G certainly doesn’t.
20 min of 4g Internet for 59 euro per month… Ha Ha Ha.. Just keep it to your self. I don’t understand why they even have apps like Netflix you tube or sky+ . If you can’t use it if you not at home on your UPC Internet . I guess faster email and email attachments are very important. It like 3g can’t handle it anymore. I hope 3 will keep their all you can eat data plan for 20 euro on prepay after they introduce 4g. Or even transfer it to 4g. :))
Athlone, dublin and part of Carlow? why Carlow?
Sptic Hogans powerbase?
That app is on Windows, plus what’s the cost of this 4G did they forget the fleecing prices?
I live less than a mile from centre of Cork. All I want is a reliable 3G (or even 2G) service from Vodafone. Something has gone wrong in past 6 months. I presume they’re upgrading to 4G and cutting a few corners along the way. Contract up shortly then it looks like it might be bye bye Vodafone after nearly 20 years (I had an 088 phone with Eircell!!)
If settle for a proper 3G network first please! It’s ok in Cork City but when I go home to my parents house in rural West Limerick it’s non existent. What a farce.
I’m on 3, so I can’t even look at the video posted until I get to connect to wifi. Even on their 3G connection, terrible network.
Ha ha that made my day. They can’t even get 3g outside dublin. Their internet is so bad. 4g yeah right
3 have been offering this in ireland for well over a year now. Non story
I’m sorry but I’m on 3 and travel the whole country for my job, after being onO2 and Vodafone, 3 has to be the worst mobile data network of the lot. Counting the days till my contact is up….
Are you mad? I have 3G anywhere I go and I’m with 3. Even when I go home, 3 are the only crowd I can get signal with. Plus, they also have the best package. Try finding another mobile operator that gives you anywhere near 15 gigs download for €20 per month.
Worst.. Customer service.. Ever..
Three does not have a 4G service yet, what are you talking about.
Three doesn’t have customer support. They have a phone number you can ring…
That’s impossible 3 don’t even have a 4G network yet
The ping test is actually slower on the 4G… 86ms is quite slow… 3G is faster on this test with 69ms….
Unless you are running the ping test about 100 times and giving us averages, what you are reporting is nothing but an anecdote.
Yep, we did say it was just a sneak peek.
I’m on Meteor 4G it’s fab
I’m going to wait til they come out with 8G.
Should be along before your contract expires.
Sorry, I know this is prob a stupid question but will 4g automatically display on my phone where 3G is displayed currently? ( iPhone 4)
I contacted Meteor today and they said I just have to go to a store and get a 4G sim card and they will activate it for me.
I already have a Galaxy S4 so the phone won’t be a problem. When I told the chap on the phone I was on a contract he said that its not a problem. I can still go for the 4G sim and my contract will stay the same.
I’ll know more later when I go and get the sim.
have your say