Clare Daly (Dublin North, Socialist Party) | Oireachtas source

There is no doubt that we have had a huge amount of discussion about this issue in recent days, and we are bound to have much more. However, none of it rings true to people outside, because everybody knows that those moving the motion tonight were the same people who did exactly the same as this Government when they were the Government. When the Government Members were in the Opposition, they did the same thing. For many Members in here, it is all a big joke and a charade. They get up here and they huff and puff, and then life goes on. The real message is that life does not go on for the people who are suffering from the consequences of the decisions that are being made here.

Let us park all the waffle and the rhetoric and look at the actions that have been taken. In presenting this budget, the Government has made a choice to put on the shoulders of the elderly direct cuts equating to about €100 million. That amount of money is nothing. The Government has exceeded the budget that the troika asked it to cut. If the Government had levied a paltry 1% wealth tax on incomes of over €1 million, it would have had five times that amount of money. If the Government had insisted on the actual rate of corporation tax - one of the lowest in Europe - being the effective rate, it could have raised an extra €2.5 billion. The Government could have presented a budget that would have given elderly citizens a decent retirement and medical and health security, but it has chosen not to do so, even though the figures are there to back up such a budget.

Not only will the cuts be devastating, but a number of them are sneaky. Telephone lines will be cut at a time when people need to ring their grandchildren who have been exiled to Australia. Under any normal situation, a couple is dealt with as two single people for the purposes of measuring medical card income limits, but they can no longer do that so the Government hits even more people. The bottom line is that the Government has alternatives and we are here to say it is about time the Government took these alternatives and that we support the grey army in its crusade to secure them.

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