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

Much of the background context of this Bill was debated in the Dáil in the Private Members' Bill I put forward last week. This context is a staggering and unacceptable increase in the levels of deprivation, poverty and hardship for some of our most vulnerable citizens, who have suffered the cruel injustice and hardship of austerity cuts since 2008. The crisis period from 2008 to 2015 seems to have gone on forever. There are also the people who lost their jobs during that time and who have been plunged into a situation of forced dependency on State benefits of one kind or another.

The last Government and the current one have hammered the innocent victims of the economic crisis from every quarter, to the point that deprivation and poverty levels have increased to a shocking point, particularly when we look at children and lone parents, but also more generally. That is a shameful indictment of our society and it is worth underlining that, while the whole world has suffered a recession, not all countries have let poverty, child poverty and deprivation increase and some have insulated children, the vulnerable and the less well off to a large degree. Other countries have failed to do so, and we are one of those countries. We have unloaded the cost onto people who could not afford it and are already suffering and struggling. We made the choice to attack them.

Sometimes, when these points are made to her, the Minister says things like she wants to activate people; that she does not want people dependent on social welfare; that she believes people are better than that and she wants to create a social welfare system that incentivises them and gives them an opportunity to get out of social welfare traps. Although we can argue the toss on some things, I do not believe a case can be made on that basis for cutting respite care grants, child benefit, fuel allowance, telephone allowance, or the household benefits package, or for prescription charges going up. All those things are just cruel and unfair and hit the people who are vulnerable. I say this in passing. Obviously, cuts in the area of rent allowance have been extraordinarily damaging and are helping to generate one of the worst housing crises in the history of the State. There is nothing in this Bill about that, by the way.

I mentioned this last week but am going to keep banging on about it so I mention it in passing again today - jobseeker's allowance for those under 26 has been cut in half and it is disgraceful. It is one thing if people under 26 are in a position to live at home but if they are not - there are many reasons why they might not be - they are by definition consigned to homelessness. They cannot put a roof over their heads on that sort of money combined with the rent allowance cuts. All of that cruelty has been inflicted, and then this Bill comes along and the Government Deputies say they are going to try and give people a bit of an incentive to get back to work.

I just came from a book launch, Complex Inequalityand 'Working Mothers' by Clare O'Hagan, an academic in the University of Limerick. I noticed one of the Ministers was over there having a read. I told Dr. O'Hagan I was about to go over to the Dáil to speak on precisely those matters, poverty traps, lone parents and so on and the changes being proposed in the social welfare system. She immediately said that what we need is a child care system like they have in Iceland or Denmark. Those are the two examples she has used in her book. That is what we need. We also need to get rid of low pay.

If the Government wants to do something about poverty traps, it should not impose cuts - sometimes they are packaged as reforms but in reality they are just cuts - in a situation where there is intersectionality, to use another academic term. Intersectionality is the crisscrossing of vulnerable groups who are oppressed and discriminated against and are hit multiply, on the double and the treble. People are hit for being a child, for being a lone parent, for being disabled, for being working class and, for some families, because of all of those things. Some families are only hit with three forms of discrimination and others are hit with two. The social welfare system is trying to cope with this and it just cannot work. This can be resolved by having a universal system of State-provided free or very cheap child care and by getting rid of low pay. If the Government does those things it will do 90% of the job. In fact, we are moving in the opposite direction.

Think about the 30,000 public sector jobs that are gone and have been replaced with Gateway schemes. Where people would have been employed by local authorities on full wages, they are now getting their dole plus 20 quid. Some people are happy to do that because they are desperate to be doing something but, in fact, they are being exploited. That is displacing properly paid jobs, and the Government should address it. We need to address low pay, jack up the minimum wage and get rid of scams like JobBridge.

The number taking up JobBridge as against JobsPlus is 2,000 versus 36,000. As I said to the Minister last week, if someone asks an employer about JobsPlus, the employer will say they must be joking and ask why they would take somebody on JobsPlus as they can take them on JobBridge. It is a no-brainer. That is shown by the contrast in the figures.

I will move on to the specifics. I refer to section 3 on the carer's allowance. This change, in terms of criteria for qualification for carer's allowance, is half described as a technical measure and is justifying the unfair practices which are currently leading people to be denied carer's allowance. It is a regressive cut and not a technical measure, justifying current unfairness. How the hell can a non-medical bureaucrat - I do not mean to be unfair to the people doing the job – second-guess GPs as to who needs care and who does not? It is outrageous and it is happening all the time. People are constantly coming to me to say they have given a GP's letter and told the Department they need care but they are told a GP's letter is not good enough and that they need a consultant's letter. We are essentially legitimising and reinforcing that by saying a non-medical person can second-guess or does not have to take the word of a GP in terms of deciding.

It has also introduced a 12 month qualification, which was not in the primary legislation. If one gets cancer, undergoes treatment and needs care, although one might not have cancer for the rest of one's life because one could be cured, does that mean one cannot get care on a short-term basis? That is what the legislation seems to say.

The Minister has not come back to us on the issue of lone parents. The back to work measure will help some but lone parents working part-time will lose. The Minister simply has not addressed that. The Bill is doing the exact opposite of what she said it would do and we have had no real response from her on that score.

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