Olwyn Enright (Laois-Offaly, Fine Gael)

This budget is effectively an attack on Irish families. Several measures have made life far more difficult for young families in particular, and I dread to think what slightly more mature families will have to face when the Minister for Education and Science, Deputy O'Keeffe, is finished with his proposals. We must see these families as real people and not simply as cash cows for the Government. I will give a real example of the impact of its decisions.

The average family with both parents working will pay at least €2,500 in extra taxes, and many will pay significantly more. However, we must remember this couple bought their property at the height of a boom that the Government blew and now live in a house that is no longer worth what they paid for it, which they will be paying off through a mortgage for up to 30 years. Now they face losing the mortgage interest relief on which they rely, depending on when they purchased their house. The same couple may have thought their home was a first step on the property ladder onto which people were almost coerced into climbing - a one-bedroom or, if they are lucky, two-bedroom place they had planned to move out of when they had a family. Now they find they cannot sell the house as nobody can afford to purchase it, and they are in negative equity. In the meantime they have had two children and are paying €1,300 a month in child care costs. They have relied on the early child care supplement even though the Government has already chopped it twice. Now it is being abolished across the board. For this couple, that is another €2,000 gone, even though their child care costs have not changed. They also have been told that child benefit will be taxed or means tested next December. The Government has hit them in every way possible. This young family has no voice. They are not represented by any interest group or trade union. They were struggling to get by anyway, and now they are sinking.

What does the Government plan to do to alleviate the burden on this family? What is the sop to make things seem less harsh? It will give them one year of free pre-school. It is estimated that approximately 81,000 children fall into this age bracket. The Government is promising to have these places available next January. How on earth can it achieve this? This promise is coming from a Government that is already spending €50 million a year on prefabs in schools. Now it is telling us that in eight months it will create 81,000 pre-school places. Nobody believes that. I ask the Minister to tell us how it will actually work. Where will these places be available? What spare capacity is out there in the pre-school sector? Will it be a mix of public and private? Will it be available in every locality? How many fully trained pre-school teachers are free to do this work at the moment? The ratio of children to adults in pre-schools should be 10:2, and the Government is committing to having 16,000 adults providing this service by next January. That is a lot to ask and I doubt it can achieve it. The space requirement is 2 m2 per child, so at a minimum we must provide 160,000 m2 of space as well.

The principle behind this measure is one I and Fine Gael have long espoused. I remember the former Minister for Education and Science, Deputy Hanafin, saying a few years ago that it had no educational value. After 12 years of having the money to implement such a measure and not doing so, the Government has decided to introduce it, not because it suddenly believes it to be worthwhile but because it allows a bigger saving to be made somewhere else.

I wish to deal with comments from Government members - and from the Minister opposite and other Government Ministers - that there have been no cuts in social welfare. I heard the Taoiseach say last night the Government would not countenance cutting social welfare rates. What do people think the cuts in the Department of Social and Family Affairs are? They are cuts, plain and simple. It is time people realised that the Christmas bonus for families on social welfare is not beer money. For many - including carers, pensioners and the disabled - it is the only little bit extra they get. Today I spoke to representatives of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, who said that many use it to buy coal or fuel to fill their tanks and thus cannot use it for any extras over Christmas. For some it is a decent Christmas dinner; for a carer, it may go towards paying for somebody to help with caring for a few hours. For families with children, it allows Christmas actually to happen. This year, is Santa, instead of leaving presents, supposed to leave a note saying "Sorry, children, I have no Christmas presents this year, but don't worry, the Taoiseach says things will pick up in 2011 - something to do with green shoots in America"? That is what the Government is telling these families.

This payment is crucial. Its abolition is a social welfare cut, pure and simple, and it is mean. What is the alternative for these families? There is none, except to turn to moneylenders. Someone from my own credit union told me this morning that is what they are seeing already. What will it be like without the Christmas bonus? There will be deeper debts, and the prospect of debt collectors, which this Government last week refused to regulate, calling to doors in January. There were alternatives open to the Government. It did have a choice. How about tackling waste in a few more quangos and monopolies, or in FÁS? The Taoiseach said this was the fairest possible path, but it is not.

I welcome to some degree the changes in the back to education allowance, but they did not go far enough. It is a pity the Minister took so long to make these minor changes. In changing the access time for this allowance from 12 months to nine months for third level, the Minister said the allowance could be accessed after nine months only if this was recommended by one of the facilitators from the Department of Social and Family Affairs. Next year there will be 500,000 people - half a million - unemployed in this country, and only 60 facilitators. The three months people will save due to this measure will be long used up waiting to see one of these facilitators. The Government cannot explain its way out of that one.

Some of the changes to the back to work enterprise allowance are an improvement and some are the opposite. Yes, it is good that the Government has reduced the time by which the allowance is available to unemployed people, although not by enough. What stopped it from changing it to six months? Can it not see the lack of logic in how it is approaching these allowances and the way in which it is depriving people of hope and opportunity? Why has the Government made the decision to give the allowance for only two years when it was previously four, especially in such a difficult climate for business? It is difficult for someone trying to start a new business to make it work in only two years. The Government is pulling the rug out from under people before they even start.

The Government members keep saying "Jobs, jobs, jobs", but yesterday they did nothing to make this a reality. There was no stimulus package, no job-creating tax changes, and minimal changes to these valuable and useful allowances. There were choices open to the Government. It made decisions yesterday, just as the colleagues of the Minister opposite, although not the Minister himself, have made the decisions over the past 12 years. Yes, we are where we are, as the Government loves to say, but it brought us here, and this budget will not point us to a way out. It has chosen the soft options and asked already hard-pressed families to pay for the mistakes made by this Government - or most of it - in the past 12 years.

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