Mary Lou McDonald (Dublin Central, Sinn Fein)

The National Pensions Reserve Fund should be used for a stimulus programme. The €5.3 billion remaining in the fund should be invested in job creation and not pumped yet again into the banks. Additional money should be drawn down from the European Investment Bank. All of this can be done. Sinn Féin has set out the real benefits of a €7 billion stimulus plan over three years. Such an investment could protect almost 100,000 jobs and create 60,000 additional jobs.

The jobs initiative has been a spectacular flop. It was much too timid. It fell far short of the stimulus shock required to get the economy moving again. Today, a cut of 3% has been made for funding jobs, enterprise and employment. In real terms, today's budget will do more harm than good in respect of jobs.

Child benefit has been cut for the third time in recent years. Child benefit is a universal payment to the primary carer, usually the mother. It is a payment made equally to all children. It is paid in recognition that the State is a poor provider for children with no free health care, education or child care. Paying a universal benefit means catching some people in it who do not need the payment. However, this is dealt with this by taxing high earners' wages fairly and by taxing wealth and financial assets fairly. One does not do so by targeting the payment, but this is what the Minister has chosen to do today.

A family with four children will be down €432 in 2012 rising to €768 by 2013. I could not count the number of times over many years, that Labour Party and Fine Gael Party spokespersons asserted – correctly – that a universal child payment was the best proven method of targeting child poverty.

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