Niall Collins (Limerick, Fianna Fail)

It all amounts to keeping more money in this country, which will resonate with many people. How he presented it was an interesting use of language, I will grant him that.

The Minister of State made a number of comments in terms of the Government having no choice. That is patently not the case. It has a range of choices in how it reduces the gap between our expenditure and what the State brings in, and achieving our deficit reduction targets. My party, no more than his own or no more than Sinn Féin or any of the other groupings in the Dáil, has met the troika. Mr. A.J. Chopra said to us, face to face, that he did not mind how the bottom line figures were arrived at once they were arrived at. He told us he was not overly concerned with the detail in terms of the measures to be taken to achieve the bottom line. That is the first point.

The second point is that much play has been made around the four year plan and reducing the budget deficit to 3% by 2014. That was moved out by the Government to 2015, which gives more space. The measure contained in this legislation should be parked in the space that has been provided by moving the deficit reduction period out to 2015.

The Minister of State stated that local authorities will become more accountable. Most Deputies have been members of local authorities and will know they are not accountable. Local authorities basically have sham corporate governance procedures and, while they have audit committees and the like, the local government auditor is not accountable to the Houses of the Oireachtas and operates completely independent of the Oireachtas. That is not good enough. There is much going on within local government which should be subject to the scrutiny of the Committee of Public Accounts and of the Dáil environment and local government committee.

The McLoughlin report of the local government efficiency review group recommended that €511 million worth of savings can be achieved across the local authority sector per annum. There is extensive scope across the local authorities to achieve these savings before we bring in this flat rate, regressive tax on top of people. From that point of view, we are looking for a number of exemptions.

What we seek in our amendments is similar to what the other groupings and Deputies are speaking in favour of. I will run through the issues dealt with in the amendments. With regard to medical card holders, anybody who holds a medical card should be exempt from payment of the charge if they are the principal of the household. To hold a medical card a person has been subjected to a means test and, arising from that, it has been determined independently that the person does not have the wherewithal to pay to attend the doctor to look after their health, which is so important to them, or to pay for drugs. If a person cannot afford to pay for health services and needs and holds a medical card, it is a logical extension that such a person cannot afford to pay the €100 household charge.

We must bear in mind that many medical cards are granted to people who have exceptional and severe health conditions, and are effectively prisoners within their own homes. This legislation is recognising that people are prisoners within their own homes and taxing them anyway, which is patently unfair and unjust. I believe the Minister of State will agree with me on that, although whether he will agree with the amendment is another day's work. I just want to make the point.

With regard to people who are living with the support of the Department of Social Protection, unemployed people, including those on jobseeker's allowance and benefit, will have been assessed and will be living on €188 a week or less. People who are in receipt of supplementary welfare allowance will also have been subjected to rigorous means testing and they are granted that allowance in addition to their other allowances because they need it. If they are on supplementary welfare allowance, ergo, they will not have the ability to pay the €100 household charge. The position is similar for people on family income supplement and farm assist.

We then move to the senior citizen category, in particular, old age pensioners who are living on State pension only. It does not make sense that these people, who are in the twilight years of their lives, who worked hard to build up the State over generations and who are living only on the humble support provided by the State through the State old age pension, would now be subject to this charge. As pointed out by other speakers, during their working lives many of these people would have bought their houses through local authority mortgages and annuity loans. They now own those properties but they are living on the same support as those living in local authority houses beside them, yet they will be subject to the charge. It is a big issue. The way it is being presented is that anybody who has had any connection to local authority housing through their lifetime will be exempt from this charge, which is not the case. A huge section of people cannot afford to pay this charge but will be brought under the umbrella of the Bill. We are also seeking exemptions for people on disability allowance and benefit, and blind pension.

There is the whole area of the negative equity generation. These people paid stamp duty at the higher rate during the Celtic tiger boom and most, if not all, of that group will find themselves in negative equity. Despite some of them being in receipt of mortgage interest supplement and some of them receiving enhanced mortgage interest relief, which was announced by the Minister, Deputy Noonan, during the Budget Statement, my party considers it reasonable that where a person can prove their mortgage payments have fallen into arrears by 75% - in other words, where they have not made more than 75% of their mortgage payments - or where their property has fallen into negative equity at a level of below 75% of the sum they paid for it, and this is independently certified by a suitably qualified person or financial institution, the persons should be exempt also.

We recognise there are people who can afford to pay the charge and will have no problem in doing so. However, there are very many who are being dragged under the umbrella of this legislation. That is inherently unfair, as is the fact they are being asked to pay into a local authority sector which is not being sweated down in the first instance.

If we arrived at a situation where the local authorities were sweated down to the degree detailed in the local government efficiency report, where savings of €500 million were identified and implemented, and if there was a sweated down efficient local government service across the country, then raising taxes to give to local authorities might be looked on differently from raising taxes to put into a service which has been identified as highly inefficient.

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