Michael D Higgins (Galway West, Labour)

Previously I spoke about what might be the framing philosophy of a social welfare system. I drew attention to the great choices there were in the founding of the welfare state in Britain and the argument that followed it several decades later. The welfare state in Britain came into existence for a specific set of historical purposes, but I drew the Minister's attention to the main principles of the confrontation of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. I did that not in a divisive way but in terms of the choices that were available as policy platforms.

Those issues still remain and are sharpened by the particular circumstances of the Irish economy which, to some extent, provide us with an even deeper version of a paradox that was there before, which is of high rates of economic growth and obdurate levels of poverty that are enclaved within the social system, and of gaps that are opening up even further between the perception of poverty and participation levels at different levels of society.

In summary, I suggested to the Minister that a good positive approach is one based on citizenship that moves through a screen of values that accept the principle of universalism. I offered him support in that and for such changes as he had made already in the legislation that were going in that direction. This is the way we must go.

To make a connection with what I said previously, I would like to give some suggestions of a more practical kind. It is crucial that the assumptions guiding welfare policy be articulated and defended. It is also crucial that they be recognised for what they are. They are the principles upon which the whole policy and set of measures are eventually structured. For example, one may make an assumption that it is the purpose of the State to defend itself against a kind of predatory mob that continually comes at it for everything it can get, whether qualified or not. This is the exact opposite of a model which suggests that citizens are entitled on a universal basis to security from poverty and many other things that flow from it, including fear, from childhood to old age. The assumptions being articulated are the honest statement of the policy. However, it is not just the policy that will be affected by the basic assumptions, but also the process.

We should recognise the important changes that have taken place, but we have still a long way to go before we have what may be regarded as a citizenship model in the intersecting points between the citizen and the State. We have made significant progress with regard to the dilapidated and demeaning buildings to which people had to go, the shutters at which they had to queue and the language to which they had to listen. I am not saying that we have replaced all the housing officers across the country or that we will never again hear the phrase "There is nothing for you".

We have a significant journey to go yet if we are to have a discourse that is appropriate to an equality of citizenship in which people will get the same standard of treatment in dealing with any aspect of the State as they would if they said they had come to inquire about new investment opportunities in Bulgaria. It is not just the buildings that must change, but also the language and attitudes.

While I have recorded and paid tribute to progress and to the measures taken by the Minister this year and last year, I must tell him that I have been disturbed by something that relates not just to his Department but to offices across the State and local government, namely, a kind of fraught intolerance of any critical comment. For example, I was trying to talk to someone recently about housing, but before I could even get started I was told "There is no housing crisis." I had not even got as far as suggesting there was a shortage. There is a notion about that everyone must defend himself or herself or that they are being attacked. We must accept that it is of the nature of a citizenship model being worked through, that people must be able to make changes. This will require at a practical level, in our own offices, among our staff and ourselves as public representatives at different levels, the continual encouragement of people to think about the way in which people are spoken to and treated. If this is a very rich economy it should be a society in which a person should grow old with some sense of security and some sense that the common discourtesy which prevails in the streets at the present time is not something that is imported into the offices of the State. Let us put an end to this business about people being threatened if they are asked a question, the poor dears.

I said in a previous contribution to this debate that I would give some examples of what I referred to as anomalies. The Minister will know I am raising this matter because I have spent a lot of my life with artists. My wife was an actress at one stage and a founding member of the Stanislavsky Theatre. I ask the Minister to seriously examine the question of atypical workers, particularly artists. Over the years I have regularly made this plea, not just to the current Minister. If one is an unemployed artist and is, as artists would say, resting, one does not have to be told about all of the jobs that are available in the local bars, hotels and so forth. One should be able to register as an artist who is not working.

There is no point in my complaining without making suggestions and there are ways to deal with this. In Scandinavian countries, for example, artists such as writers, performers, musicians and others have, by giving public performances, acquired credits which are used later to guarantee them income and even to set out the basis for an embryonic pension fund.

At the present time, there is a particular difficulty on foot of the outrageous action taken by the Competition Authority against artists. The authority has extracted from SIPTU an undertaking that it will not represent musicians, actors doing voice-overs and others in a collective agreement on the basis that such artists have undertakings and, as such, are the equivalent of pharmacies and those with a great deal of resources. The result of that action is in flagrant violation of the International Labour Organisation convention No. 98 and of the various trades union Acts, enacted through the 1990s and up to the present time.

I am encouraging a High Court challenge to this and have every intention that it will proceed because it is outrageous. The State will not grind to a halt when people's rights are vindicated, no more than it will grind to a halt because somebody should not have been docked income in the summertime, having returned to education, as the High Court has just decided today. That is a very good decision.

It is time that the Minister found an alternative to the concept of habitual residence. That concept is stopping him giving proper recognition to people who worked abroad for years, including missionaries in Africa, for example, and to people who have come here from countries that are now in the European Union and who are in carer relationships. I am thinking here of somebody looking after a blind man, known to the Minister and myself, of over 80 years of age. The problem is that the person is assumed to be anxious to go back to Lithuania.

I welcome many of the changes in the Bill and hope I have given them due recognition. If a sum of €140 million is required to abolish the means test for the carer's allowance, how many miles of road would that cover? It is only a bad weekend's income from some of the tolls, when one thinks of it over a period of time. Why not do it? The Minister would certainly have our support in that. I hope the Minister is going down the road of the positive social philosophy of not regarding welfare as residual but as a building block in citizenship that will eliminate fear and insecurity. If that is the case, he would have my support.

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