Pat Rabbitte (Dublin South West, Labour)

The basic social welfare increases are welcome and will help people in a high price economy to keep body and soul together. However, as the Society of St. Vincent de Paul pointed out, the social welfare package will do no more than that. There is no structural assault on poverty.

The meanest cut of all is that there is no reinstatement of the RAPID programme. I really regret that our friends and hard-working colleagues in the media do not address the RAPID experience. In 2001, a year before the general election, the then Minister of State, Deputy Eoin Ryan, a man whose words one would never question, launched the RAPID programme to fast-track moneys of €1.9 billion to 25 areas of disadvantage. The sum of €5 million was expended in recruiting consultants to devise the RAPID plans but when the general election was over, the rug was pulled from under it. The plans exist but they were never funded. Multiple disadvantage is concentrated in 25 areas of the country and the only contribution the Cabinet made was to add 25 more on the basis that if anything is going, we want one in our area too. The RAPID programme disappeared off the face of the earth.

The dormant accounts money came out of the DIRT inquiry and was to be distributed for this kind of social and community purpose by ADM, but the Minister, Deputy Ó Cuív, introduced legislation to take it over when he discovered the sum of money was a great deal more than the House thought it would be. He is since going around the west dishing it out like lollipops. One cannot go into a pub in the west for a quiet drink without being informed that the Minister is upstairs at a meeting with some community group and giving them a few bob.

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