Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

Given that many young men drop out of school early, they and young lone parents are the people most at risk from this poverty and unemployment trap. The other people affected are families including a disabled person, or families headed by a person with a disability.

Disability was the big story in the budget last year, another five-year rolling annual programme. Unless I missed some of the speech, I did not hear any mention today of disability. People on disability allowances are among the worst sufferers in this poverty trap. We want participation for everyone in the economy. The Minister should listen to the following before he goes. Research published by OPEN, an organisation which deals with one-parent families, shows that a lone parent with one child can drop 42% of his or her net income on social welfare, rent allowances and other benefits by moving to a 40-hour minimum-wage job.

Just because people are unemployed does not mean they cannot do the maths with regard to how taking a job will affect their incomes. Work along with education is the greatest thing a government can offer in terms of opportunity. The Government is becoming an opportunity blocker. The report published some time ago by the industrial strategy group talked of how we used to have an agile government and how Irish government is becoming sclerotic, and freezing up. We need agility with regard to social welfare, educational and work opportunities for our own people who have been left out of the loop.

I want to talk about the overall strength of the economy. In today's budget and in the public spending plans announced two weeks ago, the Minister has increased spending by more than €5 billion, but to what effect? It is surprising that after collecting so much tax revenue from taxpayers there are still so many gaps and shortfalls in our public services. As I said, the Government also collects large amounts through stealth taxes. The conclusion is that this Government is not capable of managing public services efficiently and providing good value for taxpayers' hard-earned money.

The key failures in this budget have become depressingly familiar in the recent budgets of the Government — the missed opportunities, bad value for taxpayers' money and the short-term focus, which is now on winning the next general election and buying people's votes with their own money.

We want the Government to address the key infrastructural deficits in this economy. I spoke earlier about fairy stories, in particular about Narnia. Nothing produced by the Government in regard to capital spending and infrastructure has been anything more than a fairy story. The national development plan is now little more than a national joke. Capital envelopes are an excuse not to spend money. Over a couple of years, Fianna Fáil has moved from the brown envelope to calculations done on the back of an envelope to multi-annual envelopes.

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