Joe Higgins (Dublin West, Socialist Party) | Oireachtas source

I will be succinct. The only thing the Minister said that I can agree with is when he defended low and middle income public sector workers, but I point to the fact that his Government and its predecessors have hammered them significantly already.

In a previous era Croke Park conjured up the excitement of Gaelic football and hurling. Croke Park is now a term of abuse of public sector workers, but it is manufactured and contrived by sections of the media to hammer and denigrate public sector workers and try to divide them from private sector workers for an agenda that is appropriate to a billionnaire-owned press and not the interests of society.

The Minister should be more forthcoming on behalf of public sector workers whom he is hammering on behalf of this bailout fiasco and publish examples of what the increments for low and middle income workers mean, namely, that they are critical to their lives and they have every penny spent for their children, their mortgages or whatever ten years before it arrives. We should have the truth on that. The dishonest tactic is to use the €100,000 and €200,000 plus salaries, which I agree are scandalous. The aping at the higher echelons of what was going on in private capitalism was the only aspect of benchmarking that was completely wrong, and that is being used to hammer the low and the middle income earners. The Minister should bring the facts and the truth out and not allow this vicious propaganda campaign that has been ongoing for a number of years.

I put it to the Minister that the reality of the Croke Park agreement, far from being the Eldorado for public sector workers it is conjured up to be by sections of the press, is leading to the destruction of the public sector. Taking 28,000 jobs out of the public sector has had and is having a detrimental effect on many services, and front line workers such as those in health are bearing the brunt. That is being conveniently overlooked and the Minister is looking for more now, even when the 2008 OECD report pointed to a modest public service in this country by comparison with European Union counterparts

I put it to the Minister that his fine words here about external service delivery masks a cruel agenda of privatisation. It is cruel in many areas but I will put just one to the Minister, namely, what is happening in the home scene. Public sector home helps are being told to spend less time with elderly residents who desperately need their care. At the same time leaflets from private providers of paid care are being left in elderly people's homes to pressurise their families to supplement the reduction in public care by paying for these privateers, which they cannot afford.

I am conscious that when the Minister leaves here he must present himself to the vigilantes of the troika. Unfortunately, it is their demands that will determine the outcome of the budgetary process. We might as well be talking here for the next week or leave now because nothing that we say will carry any weight in that regard but I ask the Minister to convey to them that there is huge resistance for this bailout of the European financial system at their behest on the backs of our people, and that resistance will continue. They live in a cocooned environment. Why are they staying in the Merrion Hotel, the most expensive hotel in Dublin, and is the Minister paying for that? Who is paying for it? They are coming here demanding that we bleed our people.

The Minister's colleague, the Minister for Finance, Deputy Noonan, was here earlier and he outlined some of the same figures. However, to impose further cuts in capital spending and in the current spending against a background where there are 14,000 fewer jobs in the country in the third quarter of this year compared to the second quarter will mean it will all go in one direction, which is to the detriment of jobs and will result rising emigration. This whole policy is a disaster.

The pensions for former officeholders is a scandal and a source of enormous anger. Of all the anomalies that hurt people it is what is mentioned to me on a daily basis, and there is a basis for it. That former Ministers are on pensions of over €100,000 is obscene. The Minister might say he will cut them but a cut of 10% or 15% is nothing. Nobody should be on a pension more than, say, the equivalent of an average industrial wage worker when he or she retires from their public sector job. It is incredible that while we have this pressure on home helps and so on, and that is not to tritely put one up against the other, we have these levels of massive pensions. Other allowances, including allowances and pay for Deputies, should be examined-----