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

I was a little surprised earlier when, although I did not catch all she said, the Minister suggested we were not doing too badly on international comparisons when it came to poverty, or possibly poverty reduction. It would be helpful if, when she responds, the Minister repeats what she said. However, I was baffled by that statement because the evidence in front of our eyes, and the reports and statistics that are available to us, and that have been fairly well publicised in recent months, including since the budget, suggest we are doing extraordinarily badly in terms of the extent and level of poverty in this country. Specifically, there is very harsh criticism of this budget in terms of its failure to deal with poverty and, in some cases, actually to worsen the gap between the poorest sections of our society and the better-off sections.

According to Social Justice Ireland, 750,000 people are living in poverty and an extraordinary 28% of children are living in poverty, which is more than one in four. Those are shameful statistics.

It is not just those who are dependent on social welfare who are affected but the working poor. A total of 16% of the adults in this country with an income below the poverty line are working. The phenomenon of the working poor is rife in our country. In respect of how the budget has played into this, Social Justice Ireland points out that the rich-poor gap has widened by €499 as a result of the recent budget. The rich-poor gap is the gap between a single unemployed person and a single person on €50,000. A person on €50,000 is not super-wealthy, in my opinion, but the gap is pretty amazing. According to Social Justice Ireland, that gap between the person on the lowest income and the person on €50,000 has widened by €499 per year. Social Justice Ireland says it is a multiple of that for higher incomes and that the gap has widened even more. That is pretty extraordinary and pretty shameful.

I addressed the Minister for Finance earlier this morning on the shocking report produced by Credit Suisse about the distribution of wealth in this country. It relates directly to this series of amendments and this discussion, because the gap is truly staggering. The report, whose base statistics are confirmed by the Central Bank of Ireland quarterly reports, shows that net household wealth in this country has increased consistently since 2009, much to the surprise of many families, I suspect. The only year it went down was 2008, which was the year of the crash. It has increased consistently from 2009 until today. Net household wealth has increased by 13%. I suspect most people would be baffled by that. How the hell can we be in a situation in which people have been hammered with income and social welfare cuts and are struggling to pay their bills, and in which we have the level of poverty I have just described, while, incredibly, the Central Bank's figures show that household wealth has increased? How does one explain that? There are more poor people, but the gross amount of wealth in the country has increased. Of course, it does not take rocket science to work out what has happened. Most people have got poorer, but a small number of people have become much richer. In other words, there has been a transfer. That is what the crisis has actually been about. It has not been about a shrinking of overall wealth in Irish society. It has been about a transfer from the poor to the rich. This is what the Credit Suisse report suggests in the very strongest terms.

I invite the Minister to look at a graph that can be found on Social Justice Ireland's website. It is a pie chart showing the estimated distribution of wealth in this country. It breaks it into deciles, one of which is the poorest 10%. On the graph, one cannot even see that decile, because their share of national household wealth is so small that it does not even show up on the chart. It is 0.1% of the national wealth. The national net wealth is €508 billion. That group has 0.1% of it. The bottom 40% of households in terms of income have less than 5% of that wealth between them. One then looks at those in the top 5%, who have over 40% of that wealth. The top 10% have 58.5% of that wealth. To put that into context, over 40% of that wealth equates to just under €250 billion. There has been an extraordinary concentration of wealth in the hands of the top group at the expense of the people at the bottom. That explains the extraordinary level of poverty.

Against that background, one asks what the hell are we doing in social protection and what the hell are we doing in this budget to address a staggering growth in the gap between rich and poor. The poverty statistics for families, children and even working people are utterly shameful, to the extent that hundreds of thousands of people have come out on the streets begging the Government not to ask any more. They are telling it that they cannot take any more and they want fairness. The Government says it has no alternative and that it is tough and hard, but actually, what these figures suggest is that it is not tough or hard for a super-wealthy minority who are hoovering up the wealth literally out of the pockets of the poorest and least well-off in Irish society. The figures suggest that whatever the Government is doing in its budgets facilitates that. This goes right up to the most recent budget, which sees the gap between rich and poor growing by €499 per year, according to Social Justice Ireland.

Is the Tánaiste aware of these critiques and statistics? What is the Government doing to reduce the gap between rich and poor and to give back to those who are struggling in order to bring about, if not equality - because that seems like a pipe dream when one looks at this stuff - then at least a reduction in the gap? What is it doing to give back to those who are suffering, struggling and barely keeping their heads above water, and in many cases, sinking below the poverty line?

That brings me to the final point about rent supplement and the failure of the Tánaiste and the Government to bring this into this social welfare budget. One important mechanism through which this transfer from the poor to the rich is happening is the cost of accommodation. In the past two years, rents have increased by 17% in Dublin, 8% in Cork and 7% in Galway. Rents are spiralling through the roof, but the rent supplement has been slashed and there is a refusal on the part of the Government to raise the rent caps to the levels of actual rents. If those are the levels of rent increases, the rents they are charging the people they find who can afford to pay them mean that people who own rental property are making a fortune. They are literally creaming it, so if one wants an explanation as to why we see this staggering growth in the gap between rich and poor, it is because those who own lots of property and existing wealth are using that to extract extraordinarily high levels of rent, accommodation costs and inflated property prices from those who can barely afford to put a roof over the heads. I suspect that this is one of the major conduits for the transfer from the poor to the rich. This raises the question of why the Minister for Social Protection and the social welfare budget do not take emergency measures to address that problem. It is a very serious question when one considers the levels of poverty, the crisis of homelessness and the fact that families are being driven into homelessness on a daily basis and are then unable to get out of it because of the spiralling levels of rent, the inadequate level of rent allowance and the inflexibility of community welfare officers to sanction breaches of the rent allowance cap. These are questions that are of an urgent nature, which raise the question of the morality of this budget and the entire social protection system in its failure to address these gross inequalities.

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