Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael)

I welcome the Bill to the House. I thank the Minister for staying to listen to the debate. I would like to address two points, the first of which is that it is disappointing that we are having to speak once more about the existence of poverty traps and disincentives to going back to work. It is disappointing because we have been here before, as a State. We have learned in the past about what happens when the social welfare system interacts with people on low wages. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a volume of work was carried out on these matters. Decisions were made in order to remove these poverty traps. We tried to do all we could to ensure impediments to taking on certain roles did not exist.

The late Paul Tansey wrote a book on this subject. He described how this engagement was taking place and prescribed what needed to be done to tackle it. The options are stark and difficult. It is right, from a moral and principled point of view, that we do not want to cut social welfare rates. For reasons beyond our control, average wage rates are falling in the current environment. A gap has been created. The incentive for someone to take up employment has been reduced. If we are to tackle that as a Government, as we all want to do, we have to examine the circumstances in which people access additional and incremental payments. We need to try to find a way of tailoring that to ensure that as people go back to work, they can retain those payments for a period of time.

The second point I want to emphasise, which was made by the Minister in her speech, relates to the establishment of a one-stop shop. She said we need to ensure we have a far more integrated approach to the payment of benefits and ensure people are in a position to go back to work. The observations that were drawn in the recent ESRI report on the operation of those systems were absolutely damning. I would like to refer to three of the report's conclusions. First, the report found that an unemployed person's chances of entering employment decreased by 17% if he or she had participated in a FÁS activation interview.

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