Paddy McHugh (Galway East, Independent)

I welcome the opportunity to speak on the Social Welfare and Pensions Bill 2007. I commend the Minister on the progress he has made in his Department. He has proved himself to be a socially conscious Minister who has the welfare of people close at heart. I recognise that competing interests exist in the Cabinet and it can be a fraught task to come to the table with continuous demands but the people who are deemed less well off need someone to advance their case. In the Minister, they have a friend who understands them and who is prepared to put taxpayers' money where his mouth is.

However, much remains to be done in terms of meeting the benchmark of making sure everybody is entitled to a basic standard of living. Those approaching their golden years deserve decent pensions and a sense of security. In an era of great prosperity, we should provide for the future by setting benchmarks for pension provision. The Minister has attempted to focus attention on that issue and it behoves Opposition Members to take him seriously rather than play politics. The consequences for elderly citizens of not acting responsibly will be too awful to contemplate. I welcome the publication of a Green Paper on pensions and hope it will stimulate debate.

The claim that older people have free travel is a fallacy. Those who live in Dublin or other urban areas with public transport have free travel. However, those in rural areas, such as my constituency of Galway East, do not have access to public transport and so cannot avail of free travel. This is one of the most glaring examples of discrimination against elderly rural people that I can instance. This Government has made political capital from the free travel scheme and only last week it announced the expansion of free travel on an all-island basis. Such claims, however, are drivel because elderly people in rural Ireland do not have free travel. It is easy for those living in Dublin to board public transport in the morning with a packed lunch and spend the day being ferried around the city. Compare that to an elderly rural person who is theoretically entitled to the same free transport scheme but cannot avail of it because of the lack of public transport in rural areas. It is time the Government stopped practising this discrimination against older people in rural Ireland. It should not be beyond the intelligence of Ministers or their officials to devise a scheme that ensures older people can avail of their entitlement to free transport. However, every time I raise the matter with Ministers, I get the same nauseating responses. They claim the rural transport initiative is being operated on a pilot basis but that they want to make statutory provision for it and that a further study has been carried out in that regard. However, nothing is happening.

The Government should immediately introduce a voucher system for elderly people in rural areas which would allow them to avail of their free transport entitlements by hiring taxis or hackneys. These vouchers would not entitle people to pack lunches and spend their days sightseeing but it would enable them to go to the nearest town to collect their pensions or do their weekly shopping. The discrimination against elderly rural dwellers should no longer be defended by loose talk about rural transport. These people have also contributed to the development of Ireland and are entitled to the same benefits as everybody else.

Unfortunately, I face no shortage of material when speaking about discrimination against older people in rural areas. Another example of such discrimination is the refuse collection services for older people in Galway East. Refuse collection in County Galway has been privatised, with the result that pensioners and others on low incomes cannot avail of waivers to their charges. However, pensioners in Galway city can avail of waivers because Galway City Council provides the collection service there. I have repeatedly asked the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government to introduce a universal refuse waiver system for certain categories of people but he has shown no interest in ending this discrimination. Devising a waiver system should not be rocket science and if there was a will on the part of the Minister, a way could be found. It should be possible to implement a waiver system on a universal basis whereby waste operators, be they public or private, can pass on applications to the relevant local authority for assessment. The cost of such a scheme could be met by the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government.

While the Minister for Social and Family Affairs has no responsibility for refuse collection, he is responsible for people on low incomes and pensioners. I ask him to use his influence with his Government colleagues to address immediately this discrimination against older rural residents and introduce a universal refuse waiver system as a matter of urgency.

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