Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail)

I am just explaining. Larger families have expenses and child benefit does not meet the full cost of rearing a child, or anything like it, as all of us know. One might ask why I did not take €5, which cut would have been applied in respect of the third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth child. The problem with that approach is that a family with four, five or six children would have lost €20. However, under the arrangement I propose, the extra cost would be restricted to €10, irrespective of the size of the family.

There was much debate on fraud. One of the Deputies said we were taking only €200 million in savings from fraud detection and that the savings from fraud detection last year were €533 million. I would like to go into that in more detail but I would say that the Deputy is not comparing like with like because the calculation of savings from fraud detection takes into account an imputed saving into the future whereas what we calculated was the cash saving-----

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