John Deasy (Waterford, Fine Gael)

I picked up an article over the weekend that caught my attention. The headline is "Hundreds of poor Irish buried in mass graves in UK each year". The article concerns hundreds of impoverished Irish people, with no known family, who are buried in unmarked mass graves in London by the local councils. In the case of Southwark Council, half of the 50 people whose funerals are organised and funded by the borough are elderly Irish men. Each borough has slightly different procedures but the majority of those buried in paupers' graves are laid to rest without anything to identify them and in graves with the remains of up to 25 other people. That is shocking.

I emigrated in 1986 and I witnessed the lives and hardship of people who, in many cases, have not returned to Ireland. It is important to accept in this Chamber the net effect of what has happened to our economy for many of the people who will not be returning. Some may think this is a slightly dramatic way of portraying the issue. Some people go abroad, they thrive, they learn new skills and they meet interesting people but many people do not do so well. One of my most vivid memories is being in the Rye River pub, off Jerome Avenue in the Bronx in 1987. It was 40°C outside and a line of middle-aged men were reading newspapers three days old and drinking pints of Guinness. Many told me they had not been back to Ireland in 20 years.

Yesterday, I canvassed a rural part of Waterford, Stradbally, and it was the issue on everyone's tongue. They all talked about emigration, their children leaving and the safeguarding of small businesses. In this Finance Bill, self-employed people are hit again. They will pay an additional 3% surcharge on income over €100,000. I want to address the treatment of self-employed people. I have just received the back to education allowance figures for Waterford. In 2005 to 2006 there were 275 participants. In 2009 to 2010, there were 902 participants. How many of those are self-employed people? Not as many as there should be. If a self-employed person loses his or her job, he or she can apply for jobseeker's allowance, which is means tested. However, if the spouse earns more than €400 per week, he or she does not qualify for the back to education allowance, work placements, retraining schemes or the back to work allowance. These people are leaving the system completely. They have become statistics and are completely disenfranchised. They are the ones emigrating.

If the percentage contribution for self-employed people is to be raised, at the very least they should be entitled to the basic facets of State retraining. They are the entrepreneurs and self-starters, the ones who have created jobs in this country. In many cases, they have never asked the State for assistance. If the rate of contribution increases for the self-employed, we must ensure these skilled entrepreneurs can get adequate retraining. As a State, we need to examine the question of self-employed workers generally.

Many of these Irish men and women will not come back to Ireland unless we recognise their value, their skills and, most importantly, their needs.

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