Willie O'Dea (Limerick City, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Currently, if somebody is forced to rely on illness benefit, the first three days are not paid. The employer is supposed to handle that. That has been extended to six days. There are two possibilities here. If the employer has a sick pay scheme, he or she will have to pony up. This will result on an extra cost on employers at a time when there are 32 applicants for every available job and when the Government is forcing young people to take non-existent jobs. This will do nothing to boost employment - in fact, it will do the reverse. If the employer does not have a sick pay scheme and if he or she is not prepared to pay up, the employee will be left for three further days without social welfare. What is the Labour Party's justification for that? The Minister will surely say the person can go to the community welfare officer if he or she is stuck. Unless he or she goes very early in the year to the community welfare officer, he or she will be referred to the Society of St. Vincent de Paul or some other such society on the basis that the budget has been exhausted.

I refer to a person aged 65 on invalidity pension. Somebody who has reached the age of 65 is not young, and somebody who is getting invalidity pension certainly deserves it. One has to be pretty ill to be awarded invalidity pension. From here on in, a person who reaches the age of 65, who would have been on invalidity pension and would have expected to get €230 per week, will now get €193 per week. What is the justification for that for somebody who is elderly and ill?

I will not dwell on the single parent allowance because it is more a matter for the finance Bill but suffice it to say that it is socially desirable that couples, post separation, should both participate in the welfare and upbringing of their children. This measure will be a disincentive to that. We have already got hundreds of e-mails which demonstrate that.

The changes to lone parent allowance continue apace. The earnings threshold is being reduced again. The age under which the child must be has been changed back to ten years since July. All these changes in regard to lone parents are based on the extraordinary proposition that the less a lone parent has to gain by going to work, the more likely they are to do so.

At the end of the Government's three regressive budgets, one has the following situation. One in six, or 16% of people, are at risk of poverty. This is despite the fact the measurement of risk of poverty - the income from which risk of poverty is determined - has dropped 10% since 2009. Almost one quarter of the population, or 24.5%, experience two or more enforced types of deprivation. The consistent poverty rate is almost 7%. Some 19.5% of children up to the age of 17 are in the risk of poverty category - almost double the OECD average. The basic social welfare for a single person is more than €25 per week below the poverty line. If that single person happens to be under 25, one can imagine how far below the poverty line they are.

What really grates is the basic dishonesty which surrounds the whole exercise. As I said before, the budget and the accompanying provisions are a masterpiece of spin. One can see that quite easily if one looks at the accompanying tables which show what one comes out with pre-budget and what one comes out with post-budget, whether young, old, rich, poor, employed, self-employed or whatever. The difference between the two is nil. One is not affected at all. The €2.5 billion adjustment must have come from outer space.

The fact of the matter is that if somebody is under the age of 26 and is now coming into the social welfare system, he or she will be 30% worse off than he or she would otherwise have been. If somebody is claiming maternity benefit after 1 January next year, she will be worse off than she might otherwise have been. Mortgage income supplement, which has virtually been eradicated and on which 13,000 people rely, will be phased out. If one is one of those 13,000 who will experience the first part of the phasing out next year, as night follows day, one will be worse off. If one has three or more children and is getting less child benefit next year, certainly one will be worse off, if mathematics mean anything. If one was relying on the measly allowance of €9.50 per month for the telephone rental, which is suddenly being snatched away, one will be worse off. If one is a working lone parent, one will certainly be worse off. This is not counting people who are paying medical insurance. The older and sicker they are, the more likely it is they will be paying above what the Minister for Finance described as the gold plated level. They will be worse off.

People who will pay property tax at double the rate previously paid will be worse off. People who will pay more for their children at third level will certainly be worse off. People, whether under or over 70, who will lose the medical card will, according to the Government's own figures, be at least €1,000 worse off, or perhaps as much as €1,300. The budget was not neutral despite what the tables suggest.

I am fascinated by the language. Some 92% of people who will receive maternity benefit will get €32 per week less than they would have heretofore. Not unnaturally, they are of the opinion that this is a cut but the Government has said this is not a cut of any kind but a standardisation. People coming into to the social welfare system who are under the age of 26 and who currently would get a certain amount, will get less but that is not a cut. It is simply moving people into a different category.

The whole thing is redolent of the line in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland - "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less". George Orwell invented the term "doublespeak" which is a variant of "newspeak". The essential definition of "newspeak" was that the words one was speaking meant the precise opposite of what they were supposed to mean. The three slogans, which headed up Big Brother's constitution, were: "war is peace", "freedom is slavery" and "ignorance is strength".

In the Orwellian world of Ireland in 2013, a reduction in maternity benefit is a "standardisation" and a reduction in jobseeker's allowance is simply "movement" to a different category. In 2008, the current Taoiseach described the previous Government's attempt to take medical cards from couples over the age of 70 who were earning more than €1,400 a week as a "Judas" betrayal. He now seems to think it is okay to take medical cards from couples earning just €900 a week. To adopt another Orwellian phrase, it is a case of "€1,400 bad, €900 good". In the real world we all occupy every day in every day, one becomes an adult at the age of 18. In the parallel universe of the social welfare world, one does not become an adult until the age of 26.

George Orwell said that "political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind". Would that he were here today. The whole exercise - the Budget Statement, the Minister's speech this morning and the comments that were made in the lead-up to this exercise - was couched in the language of sacrifice. We heard numerous references to 1916 during the softening-up process that took place in advance of budget day. On the day the social welfare and public expenditure cuts were announced, the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform referred to the Famine and the Minister for Finance quoted from one of the more morbid outpourings of WB Yeats. I remind the Minister, Deputy Noonan, that Yeats also wrote - I think it was in the same work - that this "is no country for old men". If he was here today, he could include old women in that phrase. He could add that this is not much of a country for the young either.

As a former teacher of English, the Minister for Finance will be familiar not only with the work of Yeats, but also with the work of another well-known Irish bard, Oliver Goldsmith. In view of the budget's total regressivity and its total failure to make the more comfortable sections of society carry any of the burden - it places the bulk of the burden on the poor - perhaps the Minister, Deputy Noonan, might reflect on Goldsmith's words in "The Deserted Village":

Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,

Where wealth accumulates, and men decay.

In 1822, the death by his own hand of the infamously unpopular Lord Castlereagh triggered a series of epithets - many of them very bawdy, some of them downright vulgar and most of them in verse - rubbishing his career. As I have said, he was noted for his unpopularity. I was tempted to quote, with suitable adaptation, some of those epithets with reference to the Bill before the House, but I will confine myself to the more sober verdicts of various organisations that are involved in this area.

In its response to last week's budget, Social Justice Ireland said: "Budget 2014 provides no guiding vision, no real sense of direction for Ireland's future, and no sustainable solutions to the major challenges Ireland faces." In the most important part of its response, the organisation suggested: "The choices Government is making are undermining Irish society and dismantling the social model that has underpinned Ireland's development for more than half a century." In its verdict, the Society of St. Vincent de Paul said that the budget "provides little by way of hope" for the poor, the old, people in poor health or the vulnerable. The secretary general of the Mandate union, Mr. Gerry Light, whom I previously understood to be a supporter of the Labour Party, has commented that 100 years after the 1913 Lock-out, we have been presented with "a Lockout Budget for the young the old and the vulnerable". These epithets, along with many more that are equally or more damning, will hang like a millstone around the neck of the Minister for Social Protection and that of the Irish Labour Party for many years to come.

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