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

I will not apologise. The Minister of State must be joking.

We end up batting back and forth with claim and counter-claim about the impacts of budgets. I am convinced that as a result of measures taken by the Government, the gap between rich and poor is growing. I do not believe everybody is feeling the pain to the same extent.

There is a fair bit of evidence that corporate profits are increasing, and the value of financial and property assets are also increasing, according to the CSO, but we are told everybody is feeling the pain in the same way. I do not believe it for one minute, but the Minister of State states that it is true that everybody is feeling it equally and we go around in circles. Why do we not have an agreed basis for assessing the impact? We could then let the public assess whether the parties here actually care about issues such as equality and the impact on vulnerable groups or whether it is rhetoric. If we have an agreed basis for assessing these things, that would allow an objective judgment by the public on the impact of various measures.

I commend the civil society and anti-poverty groups who have pushed the agenda of equality budgeting, but we need to specifically add into this mix anti-poverty budgeting. We can have equality and prosperity and we can also have equality and misery. Equality and misery is not much good, so we need to include in the criteria and indices the extent to which measures push people into poverty. We also need agreed definitions of poverty based on real consultation with civil society and various stakeholders so we do not have to have these ridiculous arguments. To my mind it is blatantly obvious that poverty is increasing as a result of the measures being taken, but let us have objective criteria to assess these matters.

See this speech in context