Ms Susanne Rogers:

Just to get it all out of my head regarding that piece about poverty, we have just come from Eden Quay and walked through town. I would ask anybody who believes that poverty is gone to walk through Dublin city centre any day of the week and see the lost and lonely, with nowhere else to be and nowhere else to go. It is really shocking. The gaps are getting wider and wider. It is like the 1980s. We had no money in the 1980s, so I could kind of understand it being the case then. The city centre is derelict; it is full of people with nowhere to go.

I do not understand how we can do that when, as Dr. Stephen Kinsella from Limerick put it at the Central Bank conference last year, we are making up new ways to spend our money in the budget. We are not going without but it is that piece about welfare. We have anti-poverty targets in the roadmap for social inclusion, we have a child poverty and well-being unit, we have the sustainable development goals, the first of which is that there be no poverty. We have commitments for 2025 and 2030. We can see the links between welfare and poverty reduction. I brought with me the recent third annual report of the ESRI on poverty, income equality and living standards in Ireland. Members will see that where it deals with poverty in older age, the graph goes up and then plummets because a political decision was made to tackle that cohort. However, the prebudget submissions come in thick and fast and they are completely ignored. I do not understand what the plan is to reach these anti-poverty targets. Even on a moral and ethical level, this should not be the case. This is where Jesus and I part ways: I am not sure I quite buy into the idea that the poor will always be with us.

Dr. Micheál Collins has updated his figures for the hidden cost of poverty. For the public service cost of poverty in Ireland, in figures from December 2023, the main estimate is a cost of €4.5 billion a year to the State to pick up the pieces from the damage done right the way through from cradle to, unfortunately, very early grave for many people living in poverty. It is that zero-sum thinking that we get locked into when it comes to these welfare discussions. It is for other people. They can live on that kind of income whereas if I lose my job, which I might if I keep talking, I will get €232. It is something for other people. It is for people who do not want to get up in the morning and do not want to go to work, which is basically everybody I know.