Emmet Stagg (Kildare North, Labour)

I thank my colleague, Deputy Shortall, for bringing this motion to the House and for her speech in the House last night that analysed the reasons for the Christmas bonus in the first instance and the case for its continuation in the interests of fairness and justice.

How we treat our old and sick and the poor among us is a measure of our worth as a society. If we are to be judged by this Fianna Fáil proposal to withdraw the Christmas bonus we will be judged very harshly. Not since Ernest Blythe took the shilling off the old age pensioners has such a mean and lousy, uncaring and miserable proposal come from an Irish Government. The Minister puts Scrooge in the ha'penny place and she will go down in history as the one who stole Christmas from the poor. The Minister's proposal is base, low, vile, cruel, nasty, dismal, shabby, unkind, wretched and niggardly. The Minister is despicable for bringing forward her rotten proposal. She should be ashamed of herself. But of course never having experienced a day's poverty in her life and cosseted from such by her upper middle class lifestyle she has neither sympathy for nor empathy with the poor. She is poorly equipped to run the Department of Social and Family Affairs.

See this speech in context