Mary Lou McDonald (Dublin Central, Sinn Fein)

The community and voluntary sector step in and intervene where the Government has absented itself. The sole reason this sector is needed in the first instance is because the Government and the State has failed to protect the most vulnerable in our society. Inner city communities like the one I represent are facing a drugs crisis not seen since the 1980s. I hope the Deputies in this House realise that. As my colleagues have said, children routinely go to school hungry, some without books. Scores of women face the brutality of domestic violence. Young people are out of work. Men, women and children cannot use computers and have literacy issues. People wonder if they will ever work again, and the numbers lost to suicide increase year on year but the Government's response to that is to give the community and voluntary sector a rap on the knuckles and to tell them, as the Minister of State, Deputy Penrose said, that they must adapt to the new economic realities.

Do the Ministers of this Government and their backbenchers have any sense of adapting to the social realities in which our citizens live or do they even care any more? The Government wants community workers, the very people who commit their lives to fixing the State's failure to properly educate, to protect and to house its citizens, to spend their time targeting a more diverse range of supports and cultivating relationships with the business community. It is difficult to believe that in a number of short months the Labour Party in particular has become so distanced from the very communities that put its members on the Government benches.

The community and voluntary sector provides essential services that the State and the private sector have failed or are unwilling to deliver. More than 7,500 groups provide these services to our children, our elderly population and people with disabilities and ill health. Their work is heroic, and I salute them. Their work is patriotic, and I salute them all the more because these people are the champions of their communities. We make no apology to anybody in saying that we will stand shoulder to shoulder with them.

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