Michael D Higgins (Galway West, Labour)

In the 25 years I have been in the Dáil, I have spoken on social welfare Bills on a number of occasions. Some of the points I made through the years must be made again. I refer to the context of social welfare legislation in this country and the extraordinary inability to debate issues of rights, a social floor or inequality. In his opening speech the Minister stated:

In the current economic and financial crisis the Government's main priorities must be to restore stability to the public finances and to deal with the jobs crisis. Tá an Rialtas bródúil as an méid atá curtha i gcríoch [agus mar sin de].

It is interesting to contrast such a statement with the statements of his grandfather, who led so many Fianna Fáil Governments at a time when there were many decent people in that party who introduced many decent policies for the best of reasons.

In the 1922 Constitution of this country and in the time between that Constitution and the 1937 Constitution, Bunreacht na hÉireann, it is interesting that equality was mentioned in the democratic programme of the first Dáil and it can be inferred in the 1922 Constitution. The grandfather of the Minister, Deputy Ó Cuív, went further, suggesting the rights to equality in a republic, which this country was not at the time, were fundamental rights. We were not only going to be equal, we were going to be republican as well.

The 1937 Constitution, in an interpretation of Article 41, prohibits Irish citizens from being conferred with titles of honour without the prior approval of the Government. The period we are coming out of sought opportunities to confer titles of honour and badges of privilege on some of the unsociable aspects, and members, of this community. I have listened to several speakers mention fraud and the potential that, if electronic means are used by recipients of social welfare to contact the office, there is a danger of fraud. I invite the people who make those speeches to concentrate on the empirical reality, the fraud conducted at the top of the banking system, the fraud committed by those at the top of building societies and by accountants and auditors, firms that received millions of euro from the State in Government approved contracts. That marks the change in politics between the first generation de Velara and the third.

When I was studying economics, accountancy and commerce, it meant something to sign off on the books of primary account, the profit and loss trading account or the balance sheet. In the period we are coming out of, the partner of the firm went for lunch with the clients and then put people on slave wages to do the books. Then, there would be another meeting with the partner to take the money from the client. That was widespread among the principal accountancy firms in this city and internationally. Eminent people in the legal profession, some of whom were senior counsels, required €250,000-€500,000 to take positions as non-executive directors.

Is there not something very sick in a society that becomes obsessed about whether a mobile telephone will be used by someone to defraud the Department of Social Protection while their tongues are stricken into silence on what surrounds them? I refer to the long delay as forensic examinations are made in the little poker club known as Anglo Irish Bank before anyone can be brought to trial. There is nothing republican or egalitarian about that, nor is there anything about it in the 1922 Constitution or the republican statement of 1916.

On the other hand, as we move into a new period, the new Government, of which I will not be a part, will celebrate the lockout of 1913, the 1916 Easter Rising and perhaps the centenary of the founding of the Labour Party in 2012. It is interesting to reflect that the participation by James Connolly in the Easter Rising was on the basis that one could have an egalitarian agenda, suitable for a republic, where we can aspire to equality and that one could join this aspiration with the worst and most regressive forms of nationalism. What we got after that was a nationalism that rejected the likes of Connolly, rejected artists, chose censorship rather than intellectual work and an obsession with sexual behaviour in private rooms rather than the morality of business or governance. That is the shabby atmosphere from which we have come. I put the discussion on fraud into the real context of the fraud that has nearly brought us down.

Other windy sections in the Minister's speech include his reference to the crisis by drawing images to the Second World War. I would be intellectually and morally dishonest if I did not point to the real crisis, which is global and European. It is of unaccountable speculative clouds that fly over one country after another. It is in the hundreds of trillions of speculative money that is doing damage in the world at present.

Yet in the international institutions, even though it was envisaged after the Second World War, there was no attempt to make such international hot money accountable. When I first came into the Dáil we had a discussion about proposals such as the Tobin tax. The Government would never agree to that, given its particular hue, because it would have made a real contribution, at 0.01% for example, that one could have gathered from hot money that would have been used for the task of development and the famous millennium development goals.

I am coming back home rather rapidly in just a moment on the detail of the Bill. I welcome many of the provisions, but I would be crazy not to address the context of other provisions. There is a global crisis in terms of the accountability of international speculative finance. There is a crisis too in Europe because the thinking of Angela Merkel and some of the people who speak on behalf of France is capable of destroying not just the eurozone, but the European Union itself. The European Union now has a choice about whether to give priority, rather like the Minister does in his speech, to the issues of fiscal adjustment or to creating a social Europe. If it does not go down the road of giving the preference to valorising a social Europe, it will drive hundreds of millions on to the streets in European countries who will feel that there is no response to the reality of their lives but that there is an inordinate response to the demands of speculative capital.

It is an Irish Minister saying in the current economic and financial crisis that the Government's main priorities must be to restore stability to the public finances and to deal with the jobs crisis. If he means that we should address the deficit, there is not a Member in this House who is not willing to address the gap between total receipts and total expenditure. That is something else. The suggestion is that there is only one single way of making that adjustment but that one is not free to do so on its own terms. One must join it to the inherited legacy that we have from an evening in September 2008 when every party in the House except the Labour Party voted for an unconditional guarantee that propped up the poker club known as Anglo Irish Bank. That legacy has now been visited upon us and people who look at the Social Welfare (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill and the budget on 7 December will see noughts being put after the amount of money that is being made available to supposedly save our banking system because it affects our reputation internationally.

One does not have to believe me. On 28 to 30 September in response to questions we had the lies of the heads of the banks as they came into Government Buildings and the con job they pulled on the members of the Government not only at that meeting, but at succeeding meetings again and again where they piled one type of evasion on top of another. In colloquial language that is called lies. On top of that, as the sums are added up the suggestion is that the deficit issue is now joined at the hip with bank debt. Therefore, the people do not know the full story of what misery they and those who come after them must now pay. That is the context of the Social Welfare (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill.

However, there is another ideological piece of inheritance and that is the hostility. Not only was there bogus republicanism and bogus commitments to equality, but, lest people think that I am inventing all of that, we should recall the Government that involved the Progressive Democrats Party contained the former Minister for Finance, Mr. McCreevy, for example. It also contained the former Minister, Mr. Michael McDowell. On page 47 of the Irish Human Rights Law Review 2010 Mr. Colm O' Cinneide refers to Mr. McDowell as saying that a dynamic, liberal economy like ours demands flexibility and inequality in some respects to function. He went on to say that driven to a complete extreme, the current rights culture and equality notion would create a feudal society, a society so ordered and static, where the Government tries to alter everything by law. It would become as atrophied as a feudal society.

He was at the heart of the Government that allowed regulation with a light touch, that allowed a property bubble, that allowed a Financial Regulator to be part of the club that ran banking and that allowed a Central Bank chairman to stay silent in the face of what was happening in front of him. The Secretary General of the Department of Finance who found it tedious to sit in the bull pen - in all my time in the House he was there perhaps twice a year for the budget and the finance Bill - has now gone off into the sunset garlanded with bonuses and pensions. The former Minister, Mr. McDowell, loved all of that and suggested we were harming the country by speaking about equality. He had his fan club in different parts of the media. The notion was that speaking of equality was not in fact the thing one should do. On it went.

I wish to refer to something that was said by a speaker on the previous occasion when the Bill was introduced. He is a decent Opposition Deputy and I admire his concern. He spoke about many thoughtful things but he said he could not accept the principle of universality. I speak as president of the Labour Party. I am in favour of the principle of universality. I would like at this Stage of the Social Welfare (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill for us to define the social floor below which people will not be allowed to sink. Then we equally could go on to debate where that line might be. We might decide, for example, that all of the disability categories would be given a minimum of such adequacy as would enable them, as Amartya Sen would say, to participate without shame in society.

I attended a meeting on disability last week which had 30 politicians in attendance. A woman held up orthothic braces that her child needed but had grown out of, and she told how long it would take to replace them. In this Republic - following 1916, 1922, 1937, De Valera one, De Valera three - we are looking after the financial markets. I remember what Owen Sheehy-Skeffington said in 1966 on cherishing all the children of the nation equally, when they were still in industrial homes, when women were in Magdalen houses, many other children were sent out of the country and people of unapproved sexual tendency were driven to England. If we are to respond to where we are now economically and socially, it is a time for building a real Republic based on inclusion and the social floor. After that, as circumstances allow and the economy recovers one can raise the bar, but let us agree on that. Instead of that, we get all these bits and pieces.

If they had time, all Deputies would tell one about how much of their office time is spent dealing with cases about habitual residence. It is rather like talking about angels dancing on the top of a pin. Was one out of the country? When did one come back? Where was one? Does one have proof of that? Good, serious, well-qualified people are forced to waste their time answering all of those questions. There are elaborate appeal processes and cases go to the Ombudsman. The Minister for Social Protection, Deputy Ó Cuív, had a woman visit him at his clinic not so long ago at my suggestion. She had been to see me. I am not interested in politically partisan advantages so I suggested she go to see himself. It was an interesting case. The woman had attended an IT course when she was a member of the Garda Síochána. It enabled her to do her job better. She left the force after perhaps 12 years to look after her elderly father until he died. She wanted to return to education. She was told that the course she did when she was in the Garda Síochána ruled her out. She was told the rules could not be changed. I do not know whether the Minister replied to her in Irish, English or Swahili - ní féidir liom aon rud a dhéanamh. That is the grandson of the great liberator. That is exactly what we are dealing with now.

For the reasons I have outlined, I believe in universality and the social floor.

One could do all of that and still be a republican. One could be in favour of equality.

It is not only in terms of the principle that we have been granted this inheritance. Every single influence of Michael McDowell in Cabinet was against the principle of equality assertion. This is why the Combat Poverty Agency is gone. It was a critical voice, so it needed to be absorbed into the Department. It is also the reason the Equality Authority and so forth are gone. Not only were we not to advance concepts like equality, we were not to discuss them either.

An interesting point follows on from my comments about 1916, 1922 and 1937. In 1975, we all went to Kilkenny and discovered poverty in Ireland. Sister Stanislaus Kennedy gave an inspiring address and off we went to found the Combat Poverty Agency. However, when the bogus riches were being puffed up to their greatest height, people believed they needed to get rid of the agency. This is exactly what occurred.

When one is as long in politics as I have been, one notices something. I do not admire the majority of those in the media who treat all of this with cynicism. It is as if members of the media, having been at the trough themselves, are involved in voyeurism. Thus, when a colleague retires, like the person on the Government side who made such an announcement yesterday, on the basis of medical reasons or whatever, the media has no interest in the why. Instead, the interest is in how much that person is getting and so forth. We have dragged ourselves down to a point at which we can hardly speak anymore about the decencies associated with a society that is a republic. There are exceptions like Fintan O'Toole and so on.

There is an interesting notion about, namely, that when one knows how deeply one is in trouble, the courage to say "left" or "right" no longer exists. As if I had the same politics as Michael McDowell. I had the direct opposite. They do not refer to politics of the left, politics of the right or Government politics. They refer to the "politicians" because this is as safe, gutless and cowardly as it sounds. If someone is a bit of an intellectual, he or she can give it a bit of a spin and refer to the "political class" and so forth as if discussing ancient Rome. The fact is that many members of the media are afraid to point the finger at those with whom they have their conversations.

I will turn to a practical example of the two different types of Ireland that exist. A campaign has just been run to save the universal State pension. We know that more than €9 billion is spent on pensions, but €3 billion is given in tax concessions to 20% of earners. If Members want, I will go through the numbers. For example, 5% or 6% of firms have taken advantage of this concession. The figure could be as high as 50% among company directors. Modest directors might have fired €100,000 into this little tax scam. A large number have invested more than €250,000, yet there are even people with €1 million invested. St. Michael Fingleton of Irish Nationwide has sailed away with his pension pot.

Where pensions were concerned, consciously introduced legislation benefited 20% or less of earners and 80% of the tax relief, which costs €3 billion in any one year, went to those people. It was they who were a class. They ate and played golf together. They numbered fewer than 100 and they dragged this country down to the dregs. They contaminated the body politic because senior people who should have been regulating and not invigilating supped with them. We and future generations will pay the price for that.

I am glad that, in the course of this debate, tribute was paid to one of the two classes of employee in FÁS, namely, the decent, hard-working employees who are trying to help people. Deputies know them in their constituencies. The other class of employees were at the top and became part of the culture, the same culture of senior counsels who wanted to attend bank meetings a couple of times per year for €500,000 and of people who wanted to be movers and shakers. Newspapers changed their style to glossy paper. Statements to the effect that we were no longer second to anyone and that everyone else was trying to be like us were made in surprising places. This was the message that came from the political right. This is the reality in which we are discussing this Bill.

See this speech in context