Clare Daly (Dublin North, United Left) | Oireachtas source

I note Deputy McGuinness asked, "Would a republican dip his or her hand into the pockets of citizens"? If that republican was a member of Fianna Fáil, then he or she certainly would. I am not a republican; I am an international socialist. My criticism of the Government is that it continued the policies of Fianna Fáil in taking money out of the pockets of citizens in order to pay back debts that were never ours in the first place. We cannot discuss the budget without putting it in the context of the debacle around Irish Water and what is going on in the economy in general. We had a discussion here this morning about the Defence Forces and frightening statistics that 20% of soldiers in the Defence Forces are so poorly paid that they must rely on FIS payments coming out of the Department of Social Protection's budget. In effect, the race to the bottom in terms of wages not only in the private sector, but in the public sector as well, is putting an enormous strain on social protection in order to bring people up to a certain level of decency or baseline.

I will not repeat points that have been well articulated. We heard terrible stories of citizens who are in the category of the working poor, and people who are simply sick of managing. People are working harder and longer than they were a number of years ago for less pay. They are being told by the Taoiseach and other members of the Government that the economy is improving, that things are getting better, but they do not feel that is the case. The payment of a new water bill has been foisted onto people's shoulders.

I agree with Deputy McGuinness’s point that Irish Water should be abolished and that we should fund water infrastructure through general taxation. I would be more in favour of taxation being increased on high earners and corporations. In the context of budgets and not being able to do enough for people on social protection, it is ironic that we heard this morning the debunking of the myth that the hundreds of millions of euro going into Irish Water will improve conservation. The regulator confirmed statistics showing that the introduction of water charges will not have an impact on water conservation and that the reduction will be approximately 6%. That confirms analysis done previously which showed that the installation of water meters was not an economically viable position, yet the Government and taxpayer are underwriting Irish Water’s investment to the tune of hundreds of millions of euro to facilitate a useless process that will not in any way contribute to water conservation. The reason I posit the argument now is that those hundreds of millions of euro could have been used to repair the water infrastructure, which is necessary, and could also have been used to ease the burden of people on social protection payments.

In many cases the contributors to this debate on the Bill deal with not so much as to what it contains, as to what is not in it and what should have been in it. Other Deputies referred to the treatment of carers in the lifetime of the Government, which has been reprehensible. Given that we had greater flexibility in the budget, increased payments together with the restoration of the full respite care grant should have been made to the 40,000 full-time carers. Although the respite care grant is a payment that is supposed to be used to provide people with respite, everybody knows that because of the cumulative cutbacks families have already endured, the grant is not always used for that purpose, but in many instances it is used for essentials such as to pay for heating, electricity and in some cases food, clothes and other such items. Everybody knows stories about families having to sell their cars and not being able to turn on their heating because of the cuts in payments. It is a false economy because the health of carers is then impacted and when they cannot do the job they too will become a cost to the Exchequer, apart from the human cost to those people who play such an important role in society.

Another area on which the Minister made great play was the change to the system of supports for one-parent families. She said in 2012 that seven was too young an age to consider removing the one-parent family support and that her goal was to bring us up to Scandinavian models of child care. If the Minister agrees that seven is too young for the payments to stop then why is that the case and where are the measures to bring in affordable child care? Nobody realistically expected the Scandinavian model to be delivered but why not at the least allow for the benefit of tax relief in the budget to off-set child care costs? There was nothing in that regard. Unless the situation is addressed then the poverty endured by one-parent families, who are primarily women, will continue. We should note that Ireland, along with the United States, has the highest child care costs in the world and the highest birth rate in Europe but we are not dealing with the issue or the level of child poverty that exists.

Another issue not addressed in the Bill, but one of which the Minister is well aware, relates to pensioners. The pension levy is having an impact on people’s income in their retirement years. Other changes introduced in previous social welfare and pensions Bills under the lifetime of the Government mean that currently measures affecting some pension schemes will have a significant detrimental impact on the livelihood of citizens. I refer in particular to the aviation pension scheme-----

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