Joe Costello (Dublin Central, Labour)

She has been ably aided and abetted by her Cabinet colleague, the Minister for Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs. That scheme provided older people with personal alarms, security lighting, door locks etc. and was operated by voluntary groups. It is shameful that a couple of million euro would be cut off when it provided such a valuable service and peace of mind to so many elderly people.

The Minister for Finance has disproportionately attacked the low paid and middle earning taxpayers in the budget. Now the Minister for Social and Family Affairs has savaged the entitlements of those who have paid their dues while they worked but are now unfortunately unemployed through no fault of their own. The Government's answer to the economic crisis is to pile taxes and levies on the taxpayer and reduce the payments to the unemployed.

The Government has no vision, no leadership and nothing to offer. There is no strategy to keep working people in employment. There is no initiative to support firms who are experiencing operational and trading difficulties. There is no attempt to combine social welfare payments and part-time or reduced working hours or working days to keep a company afloat and maintain jobs. There is an unhealthy and dangerous obsession with the banks - guaranteeing recapitalising and supporting the toxic debts at home and abroad of all the Irish banks. At the same time the dysfunctional boardrooms of all these banks remain virtually unchanged.

Some 200,000 jobs have been lost in the past two years. If the small and medium-sized enterprise sector, which is haemorrhaging jobs at present, was supported in a holistic and integrated fashion by the Minister's colleagues, the Taoiseach and the Minister for Finance, to see what interventions could be made to make credit flow available to those enterprises, which employ 50% of those employed and 64% of the entire private sector, there would be many fewer recipients of social welfare. However, there is no strategy to intervene and provide the necessary assistance or the credit flow which represents the lifeblood of those enterprises.

The Social Welfare Bill pays lip service to helping the 200,000 newly unemployed. A mere 25,000 places in welfare schemes of one sort or another for the unemployed are being provided, which is less than the average monthly job loss in recent months. As Deputy Upton said, the post leaving certificate courses have been capped. Very little can be done in that area unless they are uncapped. Courses have been capped also in the National College of Ireland in my constituency. Therefore, we cannot provide the courses that would be ideal for the unemployed, with various schemes aimed at retraining, upskilling and furthering their knowledge.

This is a very poor Social Welfare Bill. It adds further to the dismal contribution made in the budget by the Minister for Finance and will make for a dismal year for all social welfare recipients.

See this speech in context