Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Independent) | Oireachtas source

The free travel scheme is hugely desirable because it keeps people actively engaged and independent. If the 780,000 people on the scheme were all to start using cars, quite an amount of damage would be done to the environment. If we really want to count costs, then we must take all of them into account.

Like others, I have been contacted by people who have asked me questions. People understand this scheme is under review. Their reading is that if it is under review then the Government will change something about it. It is essential that the Government comes out and says what is being reviewed. I heard the Minister saying earlier that there is no threat to the travel pass. However, I was in the House when the same categoric assurances were given in respect of the Scandinavian model of child care and one-parent family payments. Only last week 5,000 families lost that payment and a further 4,000 will lose the payment incrementally in the coming years. Sometimes categoric assurances are not really worth a great deal and certainly they have not been worth much in that case.

There is a major issue of trust with this Government. The Government must use a language that is not a code for something else. There have been accusations that people are flying kites when we talk about the language of government and the primary or core rates of social welfare being maintained and that is understandable. Most people take the view that this means the social welfare system is being maintained but really it is a code for introducing something else. This has been discrediting for politics in that people had no expectation that some of these things that were to be changed were actually changed. Indeed not even this was true because the core rates, for example, for people under the age of 25 years, changed as did those for people who had payments limited to nine months as opposed to a 12 month payment. A major rebuilding project is required by this Government and the language of Government must change. The language of Government should be overt rather than covert in terms of political survival. I do not believe the Government will be able to build trust unless it deals with that.

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