Seán Sherlock (Cork East, Labour)

Was it not a very cynical move to introduce such a measure at this time of the year, knowing it would not affect people until the winter? It speaks volumes about how this Government treats older people that it did not have the guts to try this in December, during normal budgetary times, because if those who marched when the Government tried to take medical cards from the over-70s numbered thousands, they would be out in their hundreds of thousands during December.

We now live in a society with a breakdown in the intergenerational solidarity that always sustained the communities in this country. That a Government would take away an economic measure that gives comfort to older people, at a time when people spend extra on their families and themselves, was miserly and unbelievable. No Fianna Fáil leader, such as Lemass or de Valera, would have countenanced such a move during their tenures. It is a measure of how far right this Government has moved in distancing itself from the very people who would ordinarily have supported it.

The philosopher Bertrand Russell stated, "To be happy in this world, especially when youth is past, it is necessary to feel oneself not merely an isolated individual whose day will soon be over, but part of the stream of life flowing on from the first germ to the remote and unknown future". This Government is increasingly isolating our older people, taking measures that are dumping people in nursing homes who cannot get nursing home subvention, putting older people into penury in respect of how they pay for care in their autumn and winter years and now the Government is taking away a measure that gave some small assistance to see them through the winter months.

Those who I represent are not upper middle class people living in urban conurbations. They are living in rural areas, in older housing stock, have modest pensions and must have the fire lighting all day every day to keep the back boiler going to run the radiators to ensure there is heat in the house. By reducing this payment, the Minister is telling us these people can pay for their heating costs but when they go to the community welfare officer to ask for a supplementary payment they will not be given it. They would ordinarily have used the bonus to pay for the extra bag of coal or other such simple measures that sustained them through the hard winter months. I ask the Minister to think of the intergenerational solidarity we always had in this country, the social solidarity to which previous Fianna Fáil Governments adhered, and I ask her to reverse this miserly, mean measure. To introduce it at this time of the year, when it is not so high on the political agenda, is a cynical move. It is symptomatic of the cynical politics that inhabit this country.

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