Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I congratulate Deputy Maureen O’Sullivan on proposing her motion. It is powerful and timely when Ireland is hopefully beginning to come through the crisis that has beset us. I am very proud as a Member of Dáil Éireann to sign the motion supporting Deputy Maureen O’Sullivan.

The motion before the House calls for three things: a change in how we view social protection so that those who have to avail of social protection, for which they have paid, can live with dignity while trying to find a new job and recover from whatever has beset them; for socio-economic impact analysis of budgetary decisions, something I have advocated since I was fortunate enough to be elected to the House in 2011; and for a vision which would ensure coherence in public policy decisions around the common good. All of these proposals should be supported.

The issue of social protection is one for debate. I do not quite know the right answer but there should be a debate in the Oireachtas and publicly. As it stands, if one loses one’s job, one has to survive on €188 a week, regardless of one’s situation and how much one needs to live with dignity. That is an Irish solution. There are other countries in the eurozone and around the world which have a different approach to social protection. One pays in at whatever rate is agreed and if one is unfortunate enough to lose one’s job through sickness or whatever, one gets a replacement rate or close to that. It falls off over time which is a healthy incentive to get a new job. It means one does not fall into arrears on one’s mortgage and does not have to hide from the children the reason they cannot have a particular food, all of those awful changes that people, parents and families have to make when somebody loses his or her job. The rate of social protection insurance, pay related social insurance, PRSI, in this country is low. There is a debate to be had nationally which says the current rate of social protection more or less pays for €188 a week if one loses one’s job, but do we as a nation want to pay more? Do we want to move to a model that whereby the amount will be have to go up but if one loses one’s job one will continue to live in dignity while finding a new job? I would prefer that system for myself and for everybody I know. It is a choice. This Government and the Labour Party could take a real leadership role in holding that debate.

This extends to the State pension, which is a subsistence pension. We do not pay in enough. The policy of contributions through one’s lifetime is not enough. We are going to hit a pensions crisis. That is beginning as private pension funds fail. We will hit it in the public sector as well when the worker to pensioner rate moves from 5:1 as it is now to approximately 2:1, which will happen over the next 25 or 30 years. There will not be enough money out of current taxation to pay for all the State pensions. It is not just a private pensions issue. I would very much favour an opt-in policy whereby one’s PRSI will go up but a private pension might not be needed because one would pay into a pension at a higher rate, and could check it at any age by logging into an account to see where the fund is. It would be important to have a conversation about that and I wholeheartedly agree with what Deputy Maureen O’Sullivan says in the motion.

The motion also calls for analysis on the effect of budgetary impact on budgets and other policies. I have been calling for that for several years. After budget 2012 had been passed, I asked a guy I know in the Department of Social Protection who had been hit really badly. Obviously everyone had been hit because we were in the middle of a crisis and there were tough decisions to be made. I asked him had anyone been wiped out by the budget. He said lone parents had been. He said the Government was introducing a Bill which brought down lone parent support by reducing the age of the child from 18. It has come down every year to seven or eight now. He said that Bill was designed when Fianna Fáil was in government, when there was full employment and a single mum or dad could quite easily find a part-time job. The thinking was if the kids were out at school from nine in the morning till 3 o’clock, there was no reason for the parent not to go out and earn some money, and therefore the lone parent supplement could be reduced. The guy I spoke to said the legislation was never envisaged for a time when there was no work for these parents. That has been done in several areas with the result that the number of lone parents and children living in deprivation has gone up from one in four to one in two.

That is an example of why we need the kind of analysis we are not getting. There is a report I have cited in the House before that examined Ireland’s budgetary process and concluded it was one of the worst. On a score of one to ten on the quality of data given to parliamentarians to interrogate budget proposals and the time given to them to consider the budgets before voting, we scored zero out of ten. Before this debate we were debating Report Stage of the Finance Bill 2014. What is the distributional impact of the Finance Bill 2014 throughout the country? We do not know. What are its gender, geographic and age impacts? We do not know. Are there any small or vulnerable groups that have been hit particularly hard and disproportionately by the Finance Bill? We do not know. Report Stage of the Bill will be guillotined tomorrow and the Government party Deputies will vote for it. They will vote on things on which they do not have sufficient information to make those decisions.

We rely on organisations such as the Economic and Social Research Institute. Deputy Tuffy and I have had a public debate on whether previous budgets were progressive or regressive. Deputy Tuffy believes they are progressive and cited ESRI research and voted for them accordingly. I have seen other ESRI research that showed they were regressive and accordingly I opposed them. If Labour Deputies had analysis that showed that the previous budgets were regressive and did these kinds of things to vulnerable groups such as lone parents, while they might not have voted against them, they would have applied a lot of pressure behind the scenes to improve the budgets. They cannot do that without the correct information.

I hope this is something that can be improved. I note with cautious optimism that the Government amendment says that "a social impact assessment of the main taxation and welfare measures will be carried out by a cross-Department body". I do not know whether that is full equality budgeting. We will wait to see what the Tánaiste has to say. I am glad to see that something is happening, at least. If the Tánaiste is leading on the work involved in putting this process in place-----

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