Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

-----and the significant cuts over which the Government of which he was a member presided in respect of child benefit. When his Government proposed that the early childhood allowance would be converted to a preschool payment I supported that proposal at the time because I considered that we need to concentrate on the delivery of services, and the development of preschool education is important. The Deputy should concentrate less on the flights of rhetoric and a trawl around books we have all studied at school and more on the reality. The fact is that the Government of which the Deputy was a member crashed the country's economy. Nobody wants to cut or reduce a single social welfare payment for anybody because we all recognise how important such payments are to individuals; we know that from our personal lives and from our political work. We have to sort out what was left to us to sort out and we have to make the country capable of being self-sustaining on a financial basis. I welcome the Deputy saying publicly on behalf of Fianna Fáil that he agrees that children of 16 years of age should have payments paid to their parents who care for them. I welcome it because the previous Government recommended exactly that and also that the domiciliary care allowance would continue to be paid up to the age of 18 years. That is what the previous Government and various reports recommended. The Deputy is entitled to forget history entirely.

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