Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome this opportunity. I thank the Minister and wish him the best in his new role. I was tough on him in the brief period for which he was in speaking in the Dáil on health issues. I agree with Deputy Barry completely. If the Minister were seriously interested in reversing the inequality in society, he would have a different statement before us. I welcome the positive changes and the improvements that have been listed. However, they are done with the background of an improving economy allowing us to give a little more money back to the vulnerable, who really should not have suffered in the first place.

The Minister correctly pointed out that the Department has a huge budget, one of the biggest. He correctly said it is not going to people who are unemployed, by and large, but to a larger segment of society. The question is why and what is happening. Deputy Barry touched on it already. In fact he more than touched on the idea that it is to compensate for the inequality in wages. UNITE published a document, The Truth About Irish Wages, which revealed that the highest-paid private sector workers earn almost four times as much as the lowest-paid employees. Ireland has the second highest level of wage inequality behind Portugal out of 15 countries when it comes to the difference between the lowest and the highest paid. In case anyone thinks UNITE is too radical or too far on the left, let me quote from John FitzGerald, an economist who would not be known for his left-wing views. In The Irish Timeson 7 June, he stated "Ireland’s market incomes are very unevenly distributed, and the tax and welfare systems, but mainly welfare, play a very important role in redistributing income". Here we have a system that has to compensate for the bad system of wages.

Related to this, we see the report from the University of Limerick on zero-hour and if-and-when contracts.

We find that 5.3% of employees in Ireland have consistently variable hours. The highest proportion of those are employed in the wholesale, retail, accommodation, food, health and social work sectors - the most hard-working staff with the minimum protection.

I will turn now to the Minister's solution to unemployment. I welcome the fact that the unemployment rates have gone down as one could not but welcome that. However, we must look at how they have gone down. I have nothing to show me other than what the papers have exposed and well done to the media for revealing the abuses of JobBridge. There is the Gateway system for local authorities but I do not see any report on how successful that has been in leading local authorities to employ people. We now have the brand new JobPath, but the Minister should read some of the reports in The Guardianon this, which I am sure the Minister will admit is a pretty rational paper. It sets out details of the companies now employed by social welfare services in Ireland, such as Seetec. Is masla don teanga Gaeilge é "Turas Nua" a chur ar chóras mar seo. It is an insult to the Irish language to call one of these schemes Turas Nua when we are privatising the system by bringing in private, for-profit companies to remove people from the long-term waiting list. These people are suffering from bad health and disability but they are to be assessed if they are fit for work. We are paying them on the basis of-----

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