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

I am. We will take ten minutes each. The financial emergency measures legislation was used to cut the pay of public servants. It was an instance of the utterly savage and unjust gouging of the incomes of those who are, for the most part, low-paid or middle-earning public servants. They were asked to pay a cruel price for the crimes of others. This was accompanied, of course, with a horrendous wave of hysteria and demonisation directed at civil and public servants. They were scapegoated for the crimes of others. At the time, it was a rather Orwellian turn in the political narrative because public and civil servants were vilified as somehow responsible for the unprecedented economic crash when, with the exception of a few of the mandarins at the top, the vast majority had no responsibility whatsoever for the crash. In fact, that crash resulted from the naked greed of bankers, developers and bondholders, ably accompanied by the mandarins at the top of the Civil Service and facilitated by the political establishment in this country and throughout Europe.

The scale of the assault on pay and conditions was really rather savage. It is important to emphasise that it was pay and conditions and this point will be relevant when we try to assess the value of this legislation. Before looking at the facts of that assault and the extent to which this legislation does or does not move towards the restoration of pay and conditions for the majority of public and civil servants in any meaningful way, it is worth giving an illustrative example of what it has meant. It also serves to make the point to the Minister that this legislation does not do half enough and does not go anywhere near restoring pay and conditions for the majority of civil and public servants. In fact, it is another instance of the pathetic pre-election crumbs being thrown back to people who have been savaged when, in fact, the bakery has been taken off them. The Government steals the bakery and then throws back some crumbs and expects people to be grateful.

Anyway, the human reality of the situation was summed up for me in recent weeks by a case that came to my constituency office. It involves a low-paid civil servant who is facing eviction because his landlord has jacked the rent up from €1,000, which was already a difficult matter for this worker to manage, to €1,300. He is now facing eviction. He is married, he has two children and he is in receipt of the family income supplement. With the family income supplement his total monthly income is €2,054 before tax. He and his family are now faced with a rent of €1,300. How can he do that? How can he pay €1,300 in monthly rent when his income, including the family income supplement, is €2,000? It simply cannot be done, especially given all the other bills and looking after the children and so on. They are going to be homeless. Then, he will go down to the community welfare officer to see if there is any chance he can get rent allowance, but he will be told that he cannot, because he is working and therefore he is not entitled to rent allowance. This is now widespread.

I offer another example of civil servants caught in this sort of trap. Let us suppose a man happens to be a low-paid civil or public servant who is married and owns a house. Then, he becomes separated. Usually, in separation proceedings the mother and child will get to keep the house, and rightly so. However, the man has nowhere to live but he cannot get rent allowance because he owns a house, although he cannot live in that house. This is happening to large numbers of low-paid civil servants.

I remind the Minister of State and the Government that these people were in no way responsible for the economic crisis. Indeed, they were low-paid even before the crash and the assault on their wages and conditions. Is it not extraordinary that the group who were vilified to this extent are actually suffering in this way? They have nowhere to turn. Aside from this legislation, the Minister and the Government might think about what I am supposed to tell this man and his family or others like him when it comes to how they are supposed to pay the rent.

These are the low-paid civil and public servants who keep the State functioning. Perhaps the Minister of State could riddle me that one.

The situation such people find themselves in is as a result of the extent of the assault on their wages and conditions. People earning €30,000 in 2009, before the attacks started, had €16,500 taken off them between 2009 and 2015. At the end of the period covered by the Bill and so-called pay restoration, they will receive €4,351 back. Let us not forget that these figures do not include the universal social charge, which is a further attack on income.

People earning €40,000 in 2009 lost up to €27,400 by 2015. Their annual income was reduced from €40,000 to €35,000. Having had €27,400 gouged from them over those years, they will get €4,000 back by 2018. People earning €50,000 had €38,000 gouged from them up until this year and will only get €4,000 back by 2018 when the programme is completed, which is a tiny fraction of what was gouged from them. The overwhelming majority of the extra hours agreed, the flexitime that was taken away, the new sick leave scheme and so on have made it more difficult for families, along with all the other conditions which have been attacked and will not be unwound at all.

Let us sum it up in very simple terms. At the end of the period covered by this Bill, which is supposed to be about pay restoration, low-paid public servants will still be earning less than they did in 2009 when the assault took place. What sort of pay restoration is that? In 2018 low-paid civil servants will be earning less than they did in 2009. It is an absolute shocker.

For the Government and the troika, this Bill was always about what Naomi Klein called the shock doctrine, that is, never to waste the opportunity of a crisis by assaulting the share that goes to wages and workers and boosting the share that goes to profits. I do not have time to go through the details, but a fantastic paper produced by economist Paul Sweeney demonstrates this point. I do not know if the Minister of State can see the graph but it shows the collapse in wage share across Europe since the 1970s. Ireland is the worst in Europe. In 1970, wage share was 67% as a proportion of GDP in this country; it is now 50%. The European average wage share is currently 58%. We are way below the average share that goes to wages. Profits during that period have rocketed, in a direct transfer from the working people to the rich. That is what the Government has done, and it has used the opportunity of the economic crisis to accelerate it.

Why do we need this emergency Bill and to unwind it in phases? There is no emergency any more, as the Government tells us. Everything is getting better. There is an emergency in housing but the Government will not declare that to be so. However, it wants to retain emergency legislation to make sure workers do not get back what the Government stole and gouged from them over recent years. Why does the Government not focus on the real emergencies and give workers back what it stole from them?

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