Emmet Stagg (Kildare North, Labour)

Section 4 is the core of the issue as it deals with the cuts of practically every level of social welfare being paid to people under 66 years. We should remind ourselves who they are. In the first instance they are the jobseekers, 420,000 of them now, most of whom were working two years' ago. They are not, therefore, a group of people who do not wish to work but simply people who lost their jobs. They also include those people on disability benefits, those who are too sick to work, and their income will be cut. Not only will their income be cut but they will be charged for their medicines and some of them are on nine or ten separate medicines a week. They will pay 50 cent per item every time they are given a prescription. This will be a significant additional burden on them. The carer's allowance will be cut. The allowance for the blind will be cut as will allowances for single parents and all the other types of payments. I give full credit to the Government for increasing the amounts of money payable during the good times. This is an historic occasion in this House. A tiny amount of money was taken from pensioners by Ernest Blythe a long time before I was born. It has stuck in the folk memory of people that a Government took one shilling from the old-age pensioners, and that is how Ernest Blythe is remembered.

This budget, and this Minister in particular, will be remembered, for the fact that she has failed to find an alternative to taking money from the poorest people in society. All parties in the House, right across the board, agreed there was a requirement to find about €4,000 million to assist with the balancing of the books of this nation. Everybody agreed that amount had to be found and everybody then had a responsibility to say how it would be found. We brought forward our proposals; they were real, alternative proposals costed by the Department of Finance and presented. Fine Gael did likewise. None of those proposals suggested these cuts so there was an alternative to what the Minister did. Two separate alternatives to find the €4 billion required were presented in this House. It is nonsense, blather and rubbish to say there was no alternative. I am sorry I have to do it this way.

There were alternative sources of funding available to the Government if it wished to go after them. One of the alternatives we suggested was that people earning more than €100,000 per year - such as Members of this House - should pay tax at 48% in the euro. This was not accepted. We had a list of other proposals that added up to more than the €4 billion and we were to spend an additional €1.2 billion on job creation. That was our proposal. I do not want to hear again from the Government, their spokespersons or their spokespersons in the media, who seemed to swallow the Government line, hook, line and sinker, that there was no alternative. There were two very real alternatives, costed by the Department of Finance, put to this House by the two parties in Opposition and I will mention that Sinn Féin also put forward a proposal that was fully costed. There were nuances of difference between them but one common element was that the poor were protected. This is the common theme of the Opposition even though there are different ideologies in the Opposition.

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