Colm Keaveney (Galway East, Independent) | Oireachtas source

Here again we find a Bill which contains measures that will drive another wedge between the Government and the citizen. It is another sundering of the social contract that exists between citizens and the State and the intergenerational relationship. This is a predictable and deliberate result of the Government's engagement in the politics of division. It has encouraged different groups within society to turn upon one another. We now have a situation where the most socially divisive economic policies have emerged and it is now a case of public verses private sector, employed verses unemployed, able versus disabled and urban versus rural. The Minister is delighted to have a situation where people are at each other's throats, where there is insufficient opposition to this Government and where social cohesion is on its knees. If people are at each other's throats, they are not effectively opposing the Government. It is called social solidarity and was already weakened as a consequence of the excesses of the Celtic tiger years. Certainly this Bill sets out to kill off the remnants of social solidarity. It is a sad loss to think that this is the result of efforts by this Government because I see a value in social solidarity and believe it will be essential to our recovery, not just in economic terms but, more important, in social terms.

The Government has sown the seeds of discord. Groups are squabbling and competing and the Government is effectively picking them off one by one. It can continue to try to pull this trick to protect the powerful vested interests within our society and many of those outside of it. These vested interests include the legal profession, the banking sector, the international bondholders, the medical drug companies, large corporations and senior civil and public servants, including Government Ministers. The list goes on. This budget has shielded these classes from the worst effects of our current difficulties. From the failure to reform the legal services to the failure to secure saving in the medication bills for the health service, the Government has shown a marked reluctance to engage in reform that threatens those with the capacity and resources to resist it. Labour Ministers expended much hot air after last year's budget boasting of the wealth taxes they brought in. Those wealth taxes have yielded far less than had been anticipated and it is clear that the elderly and other groups must make up the difference. The thought that the Government might go back and make an effort to reclaim what it failed to gain in taxes from the wealthy does not appear to have occurred to the Minister.

This Bill attacks that which matters most to our elderly people - security in old age. With the cost of medical insurance escalating and the Finance Bill ensuring it will escalate further, many elderly people are left fearful about how they will pay their medical costs at a time in their lives when such care becomes a great concern. This Bill will leave many more facing into that uncertainty with their best friend - fear. My clinics are filled with senior citizens worried about their future medical care.

This Bill continues the odd disparity between the limits for a couple and for two single people. There seems to be some idea that people can seek efficiencies in their respective and usually different medical complaints. Previous speakers have raised this issue.

It is as if the Minister believes that a husband suffering from cancer and a wife suffering with osteoporosis can somehow seek savings in the treatment of their complaints simply by virtue of being a couple. It is nonsense. There is no fair case for a couple having a lower income limit than that of two single people.

The Bill cannot be seen in isolation. It is one of several attacks on the elderly being made by the Government. Prescription charges have been mentioned. They have been increased and that is causing grave difficulty for senior citizens. We know this because the Minister informed us of it during his time on the Opposition benches. The Government has cut the telephone allowance, increased the deposit interest retention tax, DIRT, raided their pensions and attacked their security. It has also abolished the bereavement grant, which has left many senior citizens upset that they or their spouse will have to pay funeral costs.

The Government has been pushed to such measures by the dawning awareness that their economic policies are simply not working. The growth the Government has consistently promised has failed to materialise. When the previous Government attempted to cut medical cards to the elderly, many of those now on the Government benches stood outside this building and lacerated it for doing that. They engaged in high-blown rhetoric about the debt owed to the generation that fought the civil rights campaigns, yet when the time came for them to be tested on their virtue, they failed. They talked the talk but, lamentably and unsurprisingly, failed to walk the walk.

Underlying much of this attitude towards the elderly in our society is a view in the Government that elderly people are a cost and a burden. The Minister for Health only recently blamed the overspend in his Department not on his own maladministration, but on that hitherto unnoticed, to him in the past, phenomenon of people getting older and living longer. The aged are to blame for the condition of our health services because they have the temerity to live longer. A nasty language is deployed by this Government, such as the term "bed blockers", which is a sign of a failure to recognise the inherent value and dignity of those people who are entitled to services in this country. Being a productive member of society has been reduced to meaning only those who work and pay taxes. Other forms of contribution go unrecognised and gratitude for past contributions, even in a lifetime of difficult times, is non-existent.

Some might say that this is simply Fine Gael reverting to its natural instincts in its politics, but the Labour Party at least claims to aspire to a higher ideal. Every year the Labour Party pays homage to the ghost of Tom Johnson, the second leader of that party. He was one of the authors of the Democratic Programme of the first Dáil and it is from that document the following quote is taken:"The Irish Republic fully realises the necessity of abolishing the present odious, degrading and foreign Poor Law System, substituting therefor a sympathetic native scheme for the care of the Nation's aged and infirm, who shall not be regarded as a burden, but rather entitled to the Nation's gratitude and consideration."

The aged should never be regarded as a burden in our society. They are due the nation's gratitude and consideration. I would argue, and some who preceded me have argued, that this is a noble ideal which was recognised by many former members of the Labour Party who have now attained high office. In a speech in this House in January 2009 a particular Labour Party Minister described the Democratic Programme as a vision of possibility and as constituting "the minimum demand for Labour's participation in Government". We all know the reality of that. The Labour Party has lacked the courage of its convictions and has failed the old, the young and women and left those on the margins of our society isolated.

This Bill represents yet another nail in Tom Johnson's coffin. I can only hope that the Labour Party might at least have the decency to let the spirit of this man rest in peace and take his name from the summer school it uses every year until it once again finds the courage to stand up for what it professes so earnestly to believe in the Democratic Programme.

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