Séamus Brennan (Dublin South, Fianna Fail)

Successive Governments have had a special responsibility to seek to eliminate poverty. However, we must be honest about this. Some measures of poverty are allied to lifestyle. We cannot give everyone the same lifestyle, but we can seek to remove poverty. I seek to ensure that we no longer have in our midst what the Deputy and I would have known in our childhoods — good, old-fashioned poverty. There is no place for that, however we measure it. Certain indices are lifestyle measures, for example, how many holidays one gets in a year, how many friends one has around, and so on. Some are the subject of debating societies.

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