Dessie Ellis (Dublin North West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The Government has waged nothing less than a war on the poor of Ireland for the past five years. There have been cuts affecting the old, the young and the people who care for them. No one in the State who has to eke out a living and struggle to make ends meet was spared the chop by the Government in its so-called hard decisions. Now it wants us to believe a few crumbs from the table amount to a giveaway. It is not giving away anything, as this is the people's money. It was not made by any Government but by the labour and hard work of the people and they deserve more than crumbs. Those who shouldered the cuts the Government implemented are the ones who are now expected to take the crumbs and be quiet.

Apart from the cuts they have suffered in social welfare spending, working class people have been hurt again and again by the Fine Gael-Labour Party Government. Those who own a home have been forced to pay a tax on it. Everyone is now expected to pay for the right to access clean water, despite already paying taxes. The Government has increased prescription charges, imposed massive increases in the cost of public transport and considerably increased the cost of running a car through motor tax. Ordinary families have been hit the hardest through cuts to social welfare payments.

The Government repeatedly claims that it has not cut core social welfare payments. That has been a successful mantra that the media has taken up, but for hard-pressed families struggling to keep their heads above water, any entitlement they have is core to their survival. That the Government does not consider rent supplement to be a core social welfare payment means nothing to the families who could not make up the rent and are now homeless, living in bed and breakfast accommodation and hotels. That the Government does not consider child benefit to be a core payment means nothing to the child who had to go without. That it does not consider the respite care grant to be a core payment means little to the carer who has been burnt out and the person receiving care who has seen his or her loved one lose hope.

The cut in young person's dole to €100 that has left many a person in early adulthood homeless was particularly low and inequitable. It was another low blow to young people, often in leaving care, especially considering the Government's failure to provide a right to aftercare. The Government's spin means nothing to the real lives that it has hurt by choosing to take from the poorest to protect the richest through tax cuts which disproportionately affected them.

The Government has continued to foster the hateful narrative about working class people started by Fianna Fáil and abetted by the media. It has painted them as spongers, lazy and idle, people who sit in front of their flat screen TVs, having the time of their lives, who stock up on booze and cigarettes, as Deputy Catherine Byrne claimed, and who can be motivated to do a day's work only with a firm sharp shock. They get the stick, while the wealthy and privileged are treated to the carrot.

The issue of housing is a source of shame for the Government, but it does not seem to have the capacity for shame. To save a few million euro on rent supplement payments, it cut the rates twice and refused to consider a cap completely at odds with the market. This massively increased the budget for emergency accommodation. This year alone homeless services will need €73.4 million more than has been provided in the budget for next year, although more people are becoming homeless every day. We have replaced paying for people to stay in private homes with paying many more times to place them in hotels and bed and breakfast accommodation. The concept of social housing has been obliterated under this and the previous Government, with plans to provide just 1,750 social housing units between now and 2018, while 1,500 children sleep in emergency accommodation every night and at least 130 human beings make a bed on the streets of Dublin nightly. The Minister for Social Protection has presided over a carnival of inequality, the consequences of which we will only really understand in the years to come as communities rebuild after the onslaught of Labour Party-Fine Gael austerity.

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