Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

When I saw the Fianna Fáil Deputies jumping up and down there — Deputy Tim O'Malley was a notable exception — I wondered if the Taoiseach had borrowed some of the meters used by the American on "The Week in Politics" to measure how well the Minister, Deputy Cowen, was doing. Perhaps the person who received the highest rating might have a chance at a junior Ministry. The Taoiseach wishes to allocate one before Christmas.

Today's show is all to do with floating voters and how they turn the dial. The Minister is like King Croesus, his pockets bulging with the people's money, earned through hard work. The budget's measure is how fair he has been in distributing the people's own money among them. Fair is fair, and when I heard him commit himself to significant improvements in old-age pensions, I recognised that they were well deserved, since it was the pensioners who made this country what it is today. They need the extra money to meet our very high and inflationary cost of living, not least the cost of heat, gas and electricity, not to mention the VAT of 21% that they pay on almost everything.

A dependent pensioner, usually the married woman, is worth a great deal less than her husband in pension terms. The husband will receive €209 per week, on which I congratulate the Minister, but the dependent woman is worth only €173 a week. I thought that the Minister might have reformed that, and I am sorry that he has not taken the chance offered by the vast sums of money flying around to address the issue. I welcome the increase in the fuel allowance of €4 to the princely sum of €18 a week. It is approximately the cost of a bag of coal and half a packet of fire-lighters but welcome for all that.

I want to mention something about a group more or less forgotten in today's budget but whom Deputy Bruton mentioned earlier. The position of a married, one-income family, usually where the mother, but nowadays increasingly the father, remains at home to look after the children, has worsened considerably under the Government. It was one of former Deputy McCreevy's policy changes when Minister for Finance to individualise the tax regime. More than 75,000 such households now pay tax at a marginal rate of 41% because of the Government's individualisation.

For the most part, they are families with children where one parent has opted to stay at home to take care of children or other family members. The economist Jim O'Leary wrote a very thoughtful piece on the subject in The Irish Times last week. They have lost out and would need an increase of almost €11,700 before today or €13,700 afterwards to return to the relative position they occupied in 2000, before former Deputy McCreevy acted to their disadvantage. That is how far back they have fallen. It is important, as we celebrate the gains for the high rollers from the cut in the top rate, that we think of the single-income families who did not share to the same extent in the largesse the Minister offered today. It is worth pointing that out.

When I heard the Minister speak of prudence, I thought of John Lennon's son Julian, who said that his father's favourite Beatles song had been the one with the chorus "Dear Prudence"——

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