Colm Keaveney (Galway East, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Deputy Joe O'Reilly is somebody for whom I have great respect. He was one of the first Deputies who extended a hand of friendship to me and he has continued to do so since 2011. I do not want to single out Deputy O'Reilly's speech, but a significant emphasis has been placed here today on fairness. I do not hear about fairness, however, for the cancer patient who is receiving chemotherapy in an accident and emergency unit in a public area. I do not hear about fairness for the 2,000 families who turned up for food parcels at the Capuchin centre this morning. I do not hear about fairness for the 1,500 children who regard their hotel rooms as their home and are ashamed to say at school that their address is a hotel. I do not hear about fairness for the 431 patients who languish as we speak in accident and emergency units and on trolleys. I do not hear about those with profound disability who were waiting to see the adaption and mobility grant restored in the budget, and it simply did not happen.

I am aware of emigrants who want to return to Ireland but refuse to do so because of the chaotic existing public services, particularly the health service. I write to the Minister on a weekly basis about an 18 month old baby who is the daughter of Irish citizens working in Melbourne who are highly qualified, technically superior and required in this economy. They want to return home but cannot do so because the HSE system will not provide support to keep their daughter on necessary drugs. We can cherry-pick about the type of recovery we are having.

Before the last election Deputy Ruairí Quinn boasted that only the Labour Party could be trusted with the public service because he claimed that it was the only party that would protect the public service's interests in government. With the benefit of hindsight, we now know that Deputy Quinn's utterances on this matter should be placed alongside his commitment with respect to the introduction of the registration charge that was committed to publicly in Trinity. I suppose all we have to do is look at all the other claims that were made in a so-called Tesco advertisement. When we look at the 40 cuts that took place under the stewardship of the Tánaiste and Minister for Social Protection, Deputy Joan Burton, only two of them have been restored, yet there is a perception, as we heard today from Government backbenchers, that this is a fair budget. Let us look at the fairness.

Under this Bill, newly recruited public servants are being left at a disadvantage relative to staff who were hired before 2011. The ladder has been firmly pulled up on a generation of young people in this country. An essential feature of a republic is that there should be equality before the law. Unjust differentials should not remain, and there is little sign of any future intent to remove them, particularly in the context of improving economic outlooks.

From time to time, Fine Gael, when not suffering from the strange cultural cringe that lurks in its subconscious, likes to remember that it passed the Republic of Ireland Act 1948. That might be so, but they have little idea of what a republic looks like because it does not mean that a country attacks its young people, it does not mean that the State tolerates tens of thousands of citizens being caught up in a housing or homeless crisis, and it does not mean that a country continues to fail to secure the rights of persons with a disability in the participation of the broader society.

All of this is part of a pattern that was initiated by the Minister, Deputy Joan Burton, who specifically targeted young people for special treatment. Their welfare payments were slashed, from €188 per week to €100 per week. It was as if the Minister thought that young people require less money to feed themselves, clothe themselves and pay the rent. It was a bizarre decision that young people who were homeless could survive on €100 a week.

During the recent referendum on marriage, many of the Deputies on the Fine Gael and Labour benches preened themselves under the banner, "Yes to Equality", but what they meant was, "Equality for some". As ever, they will grant equality where there is no cost involved but once any form of economic inequality is challenged, something that actually costs the Exchequer, the Government runs away. I regard this type of equality or argument around it as hypocrisy. Frankly, it is nauseating. Nobody would expect anything better from the Fine Gael Party - in fairness, at least it is honest about its position - but the Labour Party has promoted itself on the basis of social democracy values. Alas, all of that was too easily compromised in Labour's wish to be part of a right-wing Government. As ever, the consequences of that inequality are many and its effects run beyond the individuals directly impacted by those odious and horrific decisions.

In terms of inequality, there are now longer waiting times for public services, changes to duration of employment, slashes to pensions and yellow-pack nurses. In the past three years graduate nurses and midwives have had a starting salary that was slashed from €28,000 to €20,000. I do not hear too many of the backbenchers looking at the fairness of that. The Ministers, Deputies Brendan Howlin and James Reilly, were accused by graduate nurses at the time of instigating the disparagement of the nursing profession and seeking to create yellow-pack nursing. The Minister for Health, Deputy Varadkar, has done nothing to challenge that view. The attack on nursing is suggestive of an attitude of a mind that disparages professions dominated by women.

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Would any of the three Ministers involved have countenanced such an attack on a male-dominated profession? The undermining of the pay and working conditions of nurses and the effects beyond young graduate nurses has driven thousands of these young graduates to foreign employers. With so many young nurses leaving our shores, the health service is struggling to fill vacant posts. Taken alongside the continuing obstinate refusal to lift the moratorium on public service recruitment, it has led to a continuing degradation of the quality of outcome of our services for the most vulnerable people.

We have diminished our expectations of public services. It is now okay to deliver chemotherapy to an immuno-compromised patient in a public accident and emergency unit and nobody lifts an eyebrow. Nobody is concerned about the delivery of a social wage. When we discuss fairness, let us remember fairness for the 1,500 children whose address is a hotel somewhere in Dublin and the 431 vulnerable people who are lying on trolleys as we speak. When I returned home last week, I met a senior citizen who said he did not want €3 extra in his pension but wanted to know whether his wife would get the orthopaedic appointment for which she had been waiting three years. I want to know if there will be a restoration of the millions of home help hours that were cut. This is the type of fairness and social wage I want.

Taken alongside the continuing refusal to recognise the situation in the economy, particularly for younger employees such as nurses, agency staff are being used to fill the gaps. This practice has been identified as more expensive than hiring staff and contrary to the welfare of the patient consistently having somebody who understands the location and specialty. Why would the Government continue to adopt a strategy of hiring agency staff at a greater cost to the Exchequer? It does so because it does not want to have a permanent relationship with people. The constant churning of personnel undermines the consistency of care, love and attention delivered by front-line staff in the public health service.

Education has also suffered from the moratorium on recruitment and an increase in the pupil-teacher ratio. The Government seems to take the view that education is solely an instrument for preparing children to be workers. The broader view of education that includes character development, social and emotional well-being and the formation of what it means to be a citizen has been completely abandoned in our education system. Nowhere is that more evident than in the decision to remove guidance counsellors. Some 500 citizens die by suicide every year and we cut €60 million from a €700 million budget for mental health last year. Then we attacked children by taking away their guidance counsellors. If we are to repair the damage done to our society by the economic crisis, which has been magnified by the Government’s choices, concentrated and committed action is required to rebuild a broken society and it must begin with public services. Public services, alongside social protection payments, form the main part of the social wage which we discuss within the community as a key element in challenging economic inequality.

The debate on the future of public services, the division that underpins them and the ambition we have for their role in society should be the centre of this discussion in the context of a forthcoming general election. However, we continue to narrow the debate to the economy, taxation and growth. Last Sunday, a tweet from Fine Gael headquarters stated that if Ireland's economy were a rugby team, it would be accelerating fast in terms of growth of 6.5% to 9% growth. The significant majority of people I speak to want core issues, such as supports for children, to be addressed. Some 20,000 children have been waiting more than two years for speech and language therapy, audiology services and occupational therapy. This is a core part of what we talk about in terms of protecting the most vulnerable people.

While there are aspects of the Bill that I welcome, there is a significant volume missing from it. There is little evidence in the Bill of any conviction apart from a self-serving objective of ticking a box coming into the forthcoming general election. In many of my early speeches to the House, I cautioned that we should not buy an economic recovery at the cost of damaging the social fabric, and I very much fear that this is what has happened. While I appreciate that it would be the ethos of one political party in government, the absent party has let it happen. The continued attack on public services and the contraction of public services has gone some way to subsidising what is considered to be an election budget. The challenge for the next Dáil should not be primarily around a language of taxation and the economy. We do not live in an economy; we are citizens of a society. There must be a discussion about the fabric of our social structures.

Let us have a substantive debate about the reality of people’s circumstances, such as the 140,000 people on waiting lists for public housing, the hundreds of thousands of people in chronic pain awaiting an appointment in the public health system, the millions of hours that have been cut from home help services, the most vulnerable people in society, and the homeless people sleeping in turf sheds, even in my constituency. We need to start talking about delivering the social wage. We live in a society, not an economy. We can have the debate side by side. The Government is intent on driving society and the equality and fairness it delivers further down the agenda. During the past four to five years, it has diminished public expectation about entitlements, rights and equality in public services.

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