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

This Bill and budget 2016 are thread-bare attempts at making it appear that the Government is giving something back when it has given back next to nothing against a background of having slashed social protection payments to the degree that the levels of poverty and deprivation among the most vulnerable sectors of society have spiralled through the roof. The small give-backs, including the €3 increase in pensions and the €5 per month increase in child benefit, are pathetic, given that rates have been frozen for the past four years and that the groups hit most have been the victims of other cuts in so-called non-core social welfare protections and payments.

There are many people who, against a background of spiralling levels of poverty and deprivation, received nothing in the so-called "give-back" budget, including widowers, those in receipt of invalidity pension, carers, people with disabilities, jobseekers and carers under 66 years of age.

There is nothing in it for people with a disability, for the one-parent family payment, for the deserted wives' allowance or for the supplementary welfare allowance. There is no increase in the living alone allowance. All the people in those groups who have had their incomes slashed and battered with cuts and austerity and who have had their core payments frozen or cut over the past four or five years get absolutely nothing back. It is that which puts us in a situation where we have doubled the number of people living in consistent poverty to 376,000, where 1.4 million of our population, which is an increase of 128%, are suffering deprivation and where 211,000 children are living at risk of poverty or in poverty.

All those situations have deteriorated or, in many cases, are still deteriorating because of the biggest failure of all of this Government, which is its failure to deal with the housing and homelessness crisis. That crisis has resulted from the Government parties' decision to reduce social housing provision from the trickle that it was under Fianna Fáil, which had already generated a crisis, to stop it all together in the first year they were in government. They ceased the building of social housing and compounded that by slashing rent allowance in 2012 and that has led directly to the homelessness and housing catastrophe we have now, which is getting worse on a daily basis.

Let us consider the rates of rent allowance, on which the Minister, Deputy Burton, refuses to budge. The rent allowance for a single person, under the rent allowance scheme, is €520 per month, for a couple, it is €750 per month, for a couple with one child, it is €950 per month, for a couple with two children, it is €975 per month and for a couple with three children, it is €1,000 per month. Where on this planet, not to mind in Dublin where rents have gone up by about 16% in the past two years, would one find accommodation for those amounts? It simply does not exist. We begged the Minister to increase those rent allowance thresholds or even to give real flexibility, but it is not happening.

The Minister may have heard on the news about a man, with whom I was dealing, who was living in a tent on the beach. He has now moved out of the tent but he may be back living in it after only moving out of it two weeks ago because the Department is still refusing to sanction rent allowance for him. The Minister will be getting an e-mail from me begging for this money to be sanctioned, otherwise that man will end up back living in a tent along with seven other people who are living in tents on Killiney beach, and that is only the tip of the iceberg. When is the Minister going to stop giving tax breaks to the multinationals in this country and start giving some real protection to the people who are homeless, who are without houses and who are suffering poverty and deprivation?

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