Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

Equally, the Government's claims about growth and employment are utterly bogus. The reality of the fall in the live register figures is explained by two things, one of which is 40,000 people leaving the country every year. They are mostly young, educated people who do not need the so-called incentive of having their social welfare payments attacked. It is very clear that they have energy and dynamism. Why, if they did not have those qualities, would they be leaving the country? How much more energetic and dynamic could one be than to leave the country when there is no prospect of work? The State is failing to provide employment and education opportunities for young people and is forcing them out of the State. That is why there has been a marginal decrease in the number of people on the live register. They are being forced out of the country by the Government's policy of austerity.

The other explanation for the fall in these figures is the massaging of the unemployment figures through the creation of bogus jobs and bogus schemes, such as JobBridge, the new Gateways project or the JobsPlus project. Frankly, all of these are a scandal because they are about creating essentially a pool of cheap labour bordering on slave labour which will certainly profit the big corporation which will get employees for virtually nothing. Those employees will in many cases earn less than the minimum wage for doing what should be real properly paid jobs. In the local authorities and in the retail sector, all these so-called internships are nothing more than free labour. Of course, that is something that Fine Gael would long have wanted, but it is utterly disgraceful that the Labour Party is a party to creating a pool of cheap labour to exploit the unemployed, particularly young people, to the benefit of the big corporations which are taking advantage of these schemes.

Then, of course, there are the fantastical claims about the exit from the bailout which we all are supposed to celebrate. I met the troika last week. The troika confirmed something that I have stated time and again in the Dáil, that we are jumping out of the frying pan of the troika programme into the fire of the fiscal treaty terms. We will be subject to exactly the same financial and economic discipline - the demands for austerity on us inside the formal programme - when we move outside the formal programme because as soon as we exit the programme, we must move from a 3% deficit down to a 0.5% deficit and reduce a €200 billion debt, mostly incurred because we have bailed out the banks, by one twentieth every year until we have paid off that massive debt. It will utterly devastate the economy trying to pay off €100 billion worth of debt that is not ours for the next 23 years, because that is the timeframe.

People need to understand what that means. It will involve €9 billion in interest next year, a sum the same size as the education budget. When the Government states it has no money to invest in jobs and we are bankrupt, what it forgets to tell people is it has enough money to pay €9 billion in interest to the bankers, bondholders and loan sharks in the financial markets and in the European Central Bank who helped bankrupt this country. That money, which will pour out, should be going into education, infrastructure and developing jobs, enterprise and industry that could get this country back on its feet. It is a scandal.

The Government continues to wheel out nonsense claims about the improved debt situation. People do not even have an idea how bad the debt situation is. It is bad enough that it is 120% of GDP. As we all will be aware, GDP is not a good measure of this economy and GNP, which excludes the profits of the big multinationals, is. On that score, Ireland's debt-to-GNP ratio is 150%, and that does not even take into account private debt, such as all the distress of mortgage debt. We are in a cycle of debt and yet the Government remains committed to paying off the debts of others at the expense of the economy and the Irish people for decades to come. This Bill merely continues on the same line of pursuing that failed policy.

Some of the latest victims in this Bill are one-parent families. The Taoiseach, on 2 October, stated that one commitment Fine Gael would stick to - one of the few - was not to increase basic income tax rates. What have they done? One-parent families will see at least a €1,600 a year increase in what they must pay, even after the so-called tweaking of this disgraceful attack on one-parent families. Make no mistake about it, this is an attack on the family; it is not only about the father or single parent who is not the primary carer. It is a 50% cut in the tax relief that is given to families if those families happen to be separated. That is what it means. In fact, the State now has an incentive for marriages to break up because if a couple stays together in a marriage and has children, it will receive €3,200 a year by way of a tax break but if a couple with children separates, half of that money will go. It is a direct attack on children and on families which, for whatever reason, happen to separate. It is disgraceful.

The new ceilings, of €1,000 and €500 per child, for the tax break on medical insurance is another disgraceful attack. It was justified as a so-called attack on what the Minister called "gold-plated" health insurance but, in reality, will affect 90% of those who are forced to take out private health insurance because the public health system is in pieces. I hurt my arm playing football last week and I had to go up to St. James's Hospital.

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