Brian O'Shea (Waterford, Labour)

One is tempted to suggest Fianna Fáil, the Green Party and the Independents who will support the Bill have forgotten why there is a social welfare system in the first place. Although this might seem unlikely, it is difficult to find any other explanation of why the Government parties and other supporting Deputies can do this in good conscience.

I refer again to child benefit and those families not on social welfare payment or in receipt of family income supplement. There are increased costs in 2009 to factor in for such groups. Child care costs have increased by 6%, primary and secondary education costs have increased by 7% and health care costs have increased by 3%.

The worst budget in the history of the State has hit disabled people as well. Disability allowance and the blind pension are reduced by €8.30 per week. A society which does this cannot describe itself as civilised. It is estimated that the cost of living as a disabled person amounts to an additional €40 per week. Let us consider the one parent family allowance, which is to be cut by 4.1%. It is estimated that almost 20% of single parents live in poverty, while a further one in three are at risk of poverty.

I refer to the cuts in jobseekers' payments, especially the jobseekers' allowance. From 1 January, the allowance for new claimants will be reduced to €100 per week and the allowance for those between 22 and 24 years will be reduced to €150 per week. There are two direct consequences of these changes and I question whether this is what is behind all the cuts. Will this cause emigration? It is estimated that 40,000 people will leave the country in the coming year. There is also a more sinister issue, that is, this may be the thin end of the wedge in terms of forcing down the cost of employment. In other words, in an indirect way this could undermine the minimum wage and there may be a situation in this country whereby the minimum wage could drop considerably. This is something to which the Labour Party is completely opposed but it appears this is the logical outcome of the Government's budget.

This is the worst ever budget in the history of the State. It is the first time in 80 years there have been social welfare cuts. When I was growing up, I remember the luminaries of Fianna Fáil boasting of how a different Government had cut social welfare. They stuck out their chests and claimed never to have done so, nor would they ever. Now the social welfare recipients of this country are going to be devastated. It is being done in the name of there being no other way to deal with it. The Labour Party not alone showed how €4 billion worth of cuts could be effected, it demonstrated how €5.8 billion worth of cuts could be effected without this savage attack on the least well-off in society.

The Fianna Fáil that claimed to be socialist and that looked after the less well-off in society has disappeared somewhere. Fianna Fáil in the past would never have gone down the road this Government is going down. People can put on long faces and say they do not like doing this and they do not want to do it, but that there was no other way. The truth of the matter is that there is another way, and there are many other ways of doing that.

I know it is no use appealing to people not to vote for the Bill tomorrow evening at 6.30 p.m. They will do so. The Government has made sure that its backbenchers will not have to face the music in their constituencies to the same extent if this Bill was not passed until next week. One can duck and dodge in the short term. One can run, but one cannot hide. At the end of the day the Government will have the take the responsibility for this. In the interests of this country and the less well-off, the sooner the better.

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