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

I am pleased to have the opportunity to speak on this motion, which we will be supporting. It mainly concerns the gateway scheme, which everyone knows is a very different scheme from the community employment scheme. While I am not trying to be partisan or unduly critical, I never thought I would see the day when a Government, one third of which is made up of Labour Party members and which could not continue in office but for their support, would even contemplate something like this, let alone implement it. While they have not come in here tonight, I am amazed that they could go to the media outside and justify it. This is workfare, pure and simple. It is undisguised, unabashed, in-your-face workfare.

At the time of the last Conservative Party conference in the United Kingdom what the British Government was doing on social welfare loomed large. I was asked to write a newspaper article at the time comparing and contrasting the Irish Government's approach and the British Government's approach. Having studied the proceedings of the Conservative Party conference, I cannot say I was surprised, but I was certainly very disappointed at the underlying philosophy - the barely concealed contempt for the unemployed, which is typical of the Conservative Party right wing. That is the social welfare policy being pursued by the present British Government, tempered to some extent by the presence of the Liberal Democrats in government. I have been amazed at the extent to which that thinking and policy is being followed to a greater extent in this country by a Government that includes the Labour Party. The two policies and philosophies are beginning to converge.

The precursor to this scheme appeared in the last budget whereby young people under the age of 26 would have their social welfare, which is paltry enough - perhaps it is all the country can afford but in the great scheme of things it is paltry - slashed if they allegedly were not prepared to participate in non-existent training schemes or because they could not get non-existent jobs. No account was taken of the fact that at the time there were at least 32 applicants for every job vacancy. Despite the so-called employment creation of the past 12 months, the ratio is probably not much better - it has probably improved by virtue of emigration in the past 12 months. It is demonstrable that insufficient places were provided to satisfy the needs of everybody who wanted a training place. Even though they did not have the opportunity of getting a training place, their social welfare, paltry as it may have been, was slashed. In other words they were punished for being unemployed.

However, it was the underlying philosophy that disturbed me most. The snide inference was that the young unemployed in this country are a lazy idle shiftless lot who would prefer to spend their time lolling around the place rather than taking up any of the numerous well-paid jobs that are available, or who do not want to take up any of the well-established training or education places that would qualify them for such a job. That is a false image and the Government should have long since apologised for trying to create that image. Some Labour Party backbenchers went so far as to paint a picture of people sitting around for seven nights a week watching flat-screen televisions rather than getting off their backsides and going out and looking for work that was no doubt there. It was the Norman Tebbit philosophy of "get on your bike" and if people just try hard enough they will get a job or a training place so there is no need to pay them the full rate of social welfare - in fact why should they be getting paid any social welfare at all?

This proposal is not just more of the same - it goes much further. Despite all the Johns, Marys and everybody else who might want to participate in the scheme, it is not a question of people choosing or looking to participate in the scheme if they wished. The reality is as follows. Certain people who are unfortunate to be long-term unemployed will be selected - by what process nobody knows, least of all themselves. They will be summoned into the Department of Social Protection and told they will have to work on a scheme and if they do not to it their welfare will either be reduced or suspended entirely. In other words the Department of Social Protection will starve them out when their welfare is suspended entirely. That is the reality. The individuals have no choice in the matter despite what has been said here tonight. They have no opportunity to refuse or question what is being imposed on them and they have no right of appeal, as I understand it.

The job they will be offered will, as has been said, be outdoor work, often hard enough labour, for a local authority for half a working week for the following two years for the princely sum of €1 per hour on top of the social welfare they would have been getting anyway. I believe the girls in the textile factories in China were being paid a bit more than that even in Mao Zedong's time. I recently pointed out to the Minister for Social Protection that the internationally accepted poverty standard, 60% of median income, is in this country for a single individual about €210 per week. The rate of social welfare at €188 per week is approximately €20 shy of that. The Minister's response was that such people would have a medical card, which she claims is worth €1,000 and therefore they exceed the poverty line.

I wonder what happens here to people on medical cards. Let us consider a single individual who is in receipt of €188 per week jobseeker's allowance. As it stands he is €4 a week over the limit for a medical card but because his only income is social welfare he will get the medical card. As this will notionally take him another €20 a week over the limit, will he lose his medical card? On the face of it, it would seem that he does. If he does, then he is back to square one.

While I have not had time to study this in detail yet, I am assured there will also be PRSI implications. Therefore having lost the medical card he is back to €188, his disposable income falls by the extent by which he loses through having to pay PRSI. More importantly, going to work involves costs, including transport costs. Not every local authority can have its place of employment on somebody's doorstep so it will cost something to go to work. Therefore the person's disposable income falls further. Such people are now being told that if they do not take up a job where they will be working for half a week, locked in for the following two years, they will lose their social welfare. The job will pay them a minus income because their disposable income will be less than it was before they took up the so-called job in the first place.

There is something seriously wrong with this. The scheme was initially sold because of the training content. While the Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation distanced himself somewhat from that this evening, he still adverted to it in some ways.

Regarding the jobs that are in contemplation, we all know what they are and I do not belittle them in any way but we must deal with reality. I do not believe training will be required to do those jobs, and they will not give people any training for future participation in the workforce. What type of training does one get picking up litter in the park, washing graffiti off walls or standing in a gap preventing animals moving from one space to another? We must put an end to this nonsense about training. There is no training element in this scheme.

The Taoiseach stated recently in this House that the purpose of the scheme was to get people into the habit of work because if they are long-term unemployed they have lost the habit of work but experience demonstrates that the people of this country are not work-shy. The reverse is the case. When we had full employment people availed of the opportunities that existed. The best way to get a person into the habit of work is to give them a job. If the jobs are available, they will apply for them. The need and desire to work is deeply ingrained in the Irish psyche. If nothing else proves that it is proved by the fact that in the past three years alone, 0.25 million people or one in eight of the adult population of this country left their kith and kin and the security of home to go to strange lands to seek employment when they could not get it here. That is a reality. The vast majority of those were young people under the age of 26 because the youth cohort of the Irish population has fallen from 16% to 12% in recent years. That is caused by emigration.

I say this from the heart, and I am not being party political, but I am disappointed that the Labour Party Members have not come into the House tonight to listen to this debate. Is it that they cannot bear to listen to it or are they watching it on the monitors? I hope that is the case because we are living in the era of opinion polls. Various opinion polls are giving different results. I never take much account of opinion polls. I do my own opinion poll on a regular basis knocking on doors in Limerick and I can say to the Labour Party, particularly to the new young Labour TDs who may still have a spark of idealism, that their situation on the ground is worse than the worst opinion polls I have seen.

It beggars belief that the Labour Party would stand by and support something that flies in the face of everything it ever professed to believe in. If those younger members of the Labour Parliamentary Party are holding on in the belief that a few months before the Government's constitutional term runs out they can pull the plug and say to the people that they have finally seen through Fine Gael, rediscovered their principles and will not take any more, it will not wash. What happened in 1987 proved that. It is getting very late now for the Labour Party to redeem itself. This would not be a bad chance at redemption. The younger Labour Deputies should approach their Ministers tomorrow, the people who represent them in the Government, and tell them that this is a bridge too far and that it is anathema to everything Labour believes in and has ever stood for. They should tell them to withdraw their opposition to this motion and rethink the situation. It is not a question of the Opposition taking political credit. It is simply a matter of doing what is right.

There are several imaginative alternatives to this scheme, some of which were mentioned earlier. I could mention the part-time jobs opportunity put forward every year in conjunction with the budget by Social Justice Ireland. Those are innovative, useful, socially responsible employment opportunity schemes but I did not believe I would live long enough or be a Member of this House long enough to see the Labour Party supporting this scheme.

See this speech in context