Proposals to tackle the exclusion of a growing sector of Irish society include:
Income: Paying every man, woman and child a basic income to ensure that every person is above the poverty line;
Tax: Major tax reform, including widening of the tax base, redistribution of the tax burden to eliminate poverty and unemployment traps and reduction of employers' payroll taxes by £220 million;
Work: New employment initiatives aimed at the long-term unemployed, including 25,000 new positions for this category;
Rural poverty: An integrated approach to tackling rural poverty, including support for infrastructure, small farmers and rural development;
Environment: A programme of penalties and incentives to cut pollution; the prioritisation of public transport and a moratorium on the release of genetically-engineered organisms pending further research and debate;
Housing: An increase in local authority and voluntary/non-profit housing to cut the maximum time on the housing waiting list to 18 months;
Education: Targeting resources at areas most affected by poverty and increasing those available to adult education;
Health: Shifting the budgetary focus from hospitals to community care, so that this area receives 35 per cent of the non-capital budget;
Inclusion: A focus on the participation of excluded groups so that they have an input into society as a whole and into policy-making in particular;
Asylum-seekers: The implementation of the 1996 Refugee Act, the adoption of the Charter on Asylum Rights in Ireland and allowing asylum-seekers to work;
Third World: A more proactive stance from the Government at EU and international level and increases in official Government aid to developing countries until the UN target of 0.7 per cent of GNP is reached.