Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

The Minister gave the same response to the Committee on Budgetary Oversight. I am not calling for a tax credit. I am asking a fundamental question and I want to hear the Minister's view. It is not good enough to just say that it is the view of the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs. Is the Minister, as a Fine Gael Minister, happy that he is about to introduce a budget that, historically, will say the Government does not want parents staying at home looking after children, that it does not want them using a grandparent to care for children, that it does not believe in unpaid care work and that whatever a person does, he or she must get into the paid workplace because the Government wants to push the economy, whatever it takes, and it does not care if this means discrimination against a choice of different types of parenting. I would like to hear the Minister's view on that rather than getting the same answer a second time, which was not an answer to my question.

This is not a small change because the sort of subsidy which we have talked about paying, a couple of thousand euro a year, is a huge difference. In my constituency, and in many parts of the State, parents will be faced with a choice in that they will not have the option of staying at home because everyone else who is working will be paying higher mortgages and will pump up the whole economy. One has to be part of a dual-income system because that is what the Government says people have to do by the measures that it has introduced. I would like to hear the Minister's view on it rather than another repeated answer to something I did not ask.

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