Gerald Nash (Louth, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I thank Mr. McGeady. I am glad he made the remarks he did because it speaks to some observations I was going to make with regard to the question of adequacy of core weekly payments and our system more generally. We have to start looking at our social protection system through the lens of adequacy rather than simply a non-evidence-based way of generating what the rates might be every year. I have said this before in a range of different forums and I will say it again. The idea that our core weekly rates of social welfare are somehow pulled out of a hat every year and presented on budget day after several months of tiresome kite-flying is an insult to the intelligence of the people for a start. It is also absolutely offensive in my view to those who depend on the State for the bulk of their income. It needs to change. It is not just the socially responsible thing to do to introduce benchmarking and look at the system in its entirety through the prism of income adequacy. It is also the fiscally prudent thing to do for the very reasons Mr. McGeady set out. It provides a degree of certainty to the Exchequer in terms of cost into the future. It allows the State to prepare.

The best way of doing that, of course, is to ensure we have the data and evidence base we need to make those decisions. While my own sense of it is that the data has improved in recent years, we are still nowhere near the point where we can have a fully informed debate about income adequacy but also have the fully informed debate we need about poverty, how it manifests itself and how it impact on individuals, communities and society. It was a great shame a former Government a number of years ago decided to abolish the Combat Poverty Agency, for example. It was done in a triumphalist way, if people recall. I will name who did it. The then Minister for Finance, Mr. Charlie McCreevy, announced one day in the way that he did that poverty was over and it was not a feature of society anymore. It was, is and always will be unless we make the decisions we need to make to address the most insidious form of inequality people can experience, which is economic inequality. It scars people forever. We know the impact of it.

Dr. McDonnell spoke about the requirement to set up an agency, for want of a better description. We can talk again about the structures and framework and its legal status. However, would he agree that something akin to the Combat Poverty Agency ought to be established, not just to ensure we have the robust data we require but also that we have the informed public discourse about the nature of poverty, how it manifests itself and how we address it in an informed way?