Michael D Higgins (Galway West, Labour)

I welcome the opportunity to speak in this debate. I welcome those changes which the Minister proposes. It is only proper that I would so. I also acknowledge some of the structural reforms which are particularly welcome. I welcome the increase in child benefit and respite care, the raising of the income threshold for one-parent family payments, and the extension of the duration of carer's benefit. These are important changes in the right direction.

I wish to make some general points about the contribution of the Minister of State, Deputy Brian Lenihan. I will use this as a departure point to some comments which the Minister, Deputy Brennan, will have heard me make before. The Minister of State described the intention of the Bill as favouring redistribution. I hope this is so and that it is but the beginning.

The classical debate on social policy took place in the 1970s and 1980s. The debate in Britain was between Professor Titmuss and Professor Acton and discussed which models of social policy should prevail. Should it be the model that simply dealt by way of residuum with the consequences of an economy which spun away separate from the society and should it pick up the casualties? Should it be merit-based in which people are asked to provide for themselves? Professor Titmuss advocated a model that should be redistributionist. If it was to be such, it accepted that the economy as structured was inherently a creator of inequality in its tendency. This debate was not abstract and only available to and having implications for those of us who were academics in those years. It had a practical implication in regard to how, for example, one was to provide for pensions. That infamous parliamentarian who will go down in history as one of the blackest people of all time, Margaret Thatcher, became involved in the pensions issue as follows.

A problem arose in terms of the market model based on merit in regard to pension contributions, in so far as highly qualified women on high incomes who had left the labour force for the purpose of child rearing found, on returning to the workforce, that their pension entitlements were calculated on an average basis on their latest earnings. In other words, women who had achieved a particular professional point before they left work discovered, on their return to the workforce after rearing their families, that they came back at a lower level than they were on at the point of departure. In turn, the averaging that took place between that point and their retirement left them with unequal treatment in regard to pensions.

This anomaly in regard to averaging arises in regard to the Department of Social and Family Affairs, particularly in terms of those people who worked for a brief period in the 1950s, a point already made by Deputy Penrose. Between 1955 and 1960 one never had fewer than 45,000 people per year leaving Ireland. If one worked in Ireland for a year, for example, in 1954 and then left in 1955, and if pension entitlements on one's return from England 20 years later are calculated under an averaging mechanism, those forced out of the country through the absence of opportunity here in the 1950s will be inevitably penalised. One cannot deal with this either, for example, by arguing one could have acquired credits or benefits in England because, in many cases, some of the people who exploited the Irish in Britain were Irish themselves.

This is not a party political point — it would arise with any Minister dealing with this matter. When I was in Britain I remember noticing the difference between those who were working on the lump and Irish contractors who drove in Rolls Royces to Old Trafford, dropping off on the way to the Conservative Club but who had not properly looked after many hundreds of their fellow Irishmen in regard to social welfare contributions. This brings me to the point about the Pensions Ombudsman's report which reveals quite a scandal in terms of the large number of construction workers who are left unprotected. This simply has to stop.

I come to the choices facing the Minister and I want to be positive. I regard the spirited intentions of the Minister of State, Deputy Brian Lenihan, to be redistributionist as more idealistic in intention than practical in achievement. One has to make choices. The choices fall to those of us on the Opposition benches as well, as to which model we follow. I get the impression the Minister, Deputy Brennan, possibly shares my view in regard to this. In the same way as Fukuyama has been converted from neoconservatism, the Minister has mitigated his market model.

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