Clare Daly (Dublin North, United Left) | Oireachtas source

Even the Title of this Bill is wrong. Rather than being titled the Social Welfare Bill it should be titled the corporate welfare Bill because that is what social protection has become in this country. Rather than it being a necessary safety valve for citizens when they fall on hard times or find themselves out of work, it is a vehicle to transfer wealth and line the pockets of big business, in part, through the facilitation of labour activation schemes which have given rise to an almighty race to the bottom.

I want to read an email I received from a constituent which really struck a chord with me. The catalyst for it was the protestations of the Taoiseach and his Government that a recovery was under way; that we had all taken great strides forward; that the number of people unemployed had fallen and that we should all be proud of what we had achieved. The man is sickened by the impact of what the Government has done on his health and it led him to compose the following email. It reads:

I've done what these people and their kind have told me to do for the last 15 years, I'm no better off now than I was then: in fact, in terms of my mental health and general demeanour, I'm decidedly worse off.

The Establishment told me to get an education. I asked what I should do. They advised me to do what I was good at. I am good at philosophy ... I got a first class degree and Masters in philosophy. The goal posts then changed. I was told that employers didn't want philosophers and that I needed to add more strings to my bow. I told them I had no money. They said I should take the dole for a few weeks and then do a Jobbridge Internship. And that's what I did, winding up in a policy section of a Government Department where I produced tightly argued papers that recommended scheme changes that I knew to be wrong - all for the princely sum of €200 per week and no PRSI contributions. The Establishment seemed happy, but not happy enough to give me a job. Well, it couldn't given the recruitment embargo.

The email continues:

I was told to hold tight for some temporary clerical work ... In the meantime, they tricked up another internship that saw me at the front-line. I was told I couldn't be soft and would have to treat the customers hard. Of course, they did not put it that frankly but still the message was clear: the customers, all of the customers are chancers and must be treated accordingly.

I then got moved to a section in a different Department, the job in question being slightly more humane. I was then told I could maybe hang on for another temporary job. At that stage, I'd had enough. I walked out of the Department and the Jobbridge scheme and into a zero-hour contract with an English language school.

This is the Ireland the Government has created. That is the process it has facilitated with its misnamed social welfare system which has resulted in millions being taken out of a budget that should be in place to support people rather than facilitate employers to not offer decent jobs. Advertisements have been placed for qualified veterinarians, teachers in private schools, qualified chemists, medical scientists in the HSE, shelf stackers in Tesco, administrators in the Department of Health, social media administrators in RTE and kit assistants in the FAI. That is what we are talking about in the context of labour and job creation. Hundreds of under-employed and short-term working teachers have to rely on the social protection budget to obtain a decent working week's wages. Casual and part-time work is utter lunacy. It is facilitating a transfer of wealth from the taxpayer to those at the top.

The Minister's reference to the maintenance of core social welfare rates is an insult against the backdrop of rising inflation and the appalling inaction of the Government in its failure to deal with the glaring disconnect between rent supplement payments and the actual cost of renting. The current rent supplement for a single person is €520 per month and for a couple, €750 per month, despite the fact that the cost of renting a two bedroom property in the city is €1,700 per month. How are people supposed to make up the deficit? They cannot do it. In 2010 alone, the Department of Health transferred, by way of rent supplement, €2.5 billion of taxpayers' money into the pockets of private landlords. That is what the Government has stood over. The Social Welfare Bill does not tackle any of these structural injustices that are now built into the system.

The Government has given pensioners a pittance of an increase and at the same time robbed those in private pension schemes. The Bill is a joke and the people will see through it. It is scandalous that it is being put forward under the stewardship of the Labour Party in government.

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