Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

The situation concerning maternity benefit is that, like other such payments, it is paid out of the social insurance fund. When Deputy Donnelly examined those statistics he will have seen that there was a fall of about 250,000 people in employment, most of whom were men. The consequence of that reduction is that more men are going back to work because construction has begun to pick up slightly again. What the Deputy was saying was basically a fallacy. He is well up enough on statistics to know that. Pressure on the social insurance fund has resulted in an enormous deficit. The fund is the core way in which we make a whole variety of payments, particularly to contributory pensioners, as well as widows and widowers who have a contributory entitlement. That fund has been in serious deficit since the crash because of the reduction in the number of people in employment. The fund is beginning to recover slightly because more people are going back to work, as Deputy Donnelly acknowledged. More men are returning to work than women because more men were affected in relatively huge proportions by the crash in construction.

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