Clare Daly (Dublin Fingal, Independent) | Oireachtas source

At lunchtime one of the Dáil wits made the point that yesterday should really have been called "Fiver Tuesday". There was a fiver for everyone in the audience unless one was a young person and not deemed to be good enough to even get the fiver as if it was going to make a fundamental difference to the living standards of people in the State. Like everybody else, I am sure the Minister would forgive us for being somewhat underwhelmed by the budget. Already all Deputies will have experienced a huge number of people getting in touch with them to make the point about the gigantic gulf that exists between the reality of people's lives and the spin and propaganda that developed around this budget. One example would be Martin from Sligo who wrote to me about the so-called increase in the old age pension and the insulting fact that the social welfare payments have been delayed. Stephen, a man from my own area, is a construction worker who, in his own words, was forced to be in the bogus self-employment category. There was nothing in the budget for him. The last time he was laid off he was unemployed for six months and was cut off with no payments at all for four of those months because he was deemed to have earned an average of €188 per week in the year prior his employment ceasing. Consider Jane from Wexford who was nearly sick while listening to the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform, Deputy Donohoe, speaking last night about the budget and how it is the largest health budget in the history of the State. Jane made the point to me that if this is the case, then why in God's name does she have to beg, plead and very possibly protest for even the most basic of rights for her children, two of whom have severe disabilities. Jane pointed out that the Minister, Deputy Donohoe, had said the increased budget meant the HSE has an increased responsibility and accountability at managerial level in the health service. The reality, however, for families who are interfacing with the HSE is that there is no accountability and no transparency whatsoever. Families are being put through hell when looking for even basic resources. In Jane's case, she is a lone parent because her husband tragically died and she has two young children both of whom have severe disabilities. She is facing the prospect of having to protest for a couple of extra hours help, so she can bring one of those young men to the hospital. The response she received from the HSE more or less said that if she kept this up, then the HSE would force her to put the young man into foster care. Apart from the potential costs to the State should he be put into foster care, which his family do not want, this was an insult to her because the young man has a loving family to look after him. That level of incompetence and mismanagement in the HSE is shackled throughout the organisation.

Yesterday I, along with many other Deputies, had an invitation to attend the premiere of Ken Loach's award wining film "I, Daniel Blake" which sadly clashed with the budget speech. We were faced with a choice. Would we sit around and listen to the usual nonsense and platitudes around the budget or would we go to see the film? It is about an unemployed man who had worked all his life as a carpenter, becomes ill as a result of a heart attack and is put through the rigours of trying to access social welfare benefits. The film shows the people he meets along that journey and the new face of the new buzzword system of social protection and social assistance. We made the only and absolutely correct choice, and I do not want to be in any way flippant, but we thought we would learn a hell of a lot more by seeing the film last night. I strongly recommend that the Minister and every Deputy in the House go to see the film when it starts showing in the Lighthouse cinema from Friday, 21 October. I do not say this as a joke. I say it because, for all the spin and jargon, the reality is that Ireland's system of social welfare, or social protection as it is incorrectly called in the State, is copied at every turn from what goes on in Britain. The film exposed a system that dehumanises people who have worked all their lives and forces them to believe they are spongers and scroungers. The system forces them onto fake training schemes and tells them how to do curricula vitae for jobs that are never there. These are people who would love to work if they had the ability, health-wise, or if the jobs were there. The film really brought home to me the discussion we had during Oral Questions with the Minister for Social Protection, Deputy Varadkar, last week. During that debate, Deputies highlighted some of the systems Ireland has copied from the United Kingdom. We have the versions of Seetec Limited and all the others. The Minister was able to get away with painting a picture of people in our system who are being offered "employment opportunities" which would cost a person hundreds of euro to take up. There would be no realistic prospect a decent job at the end of it. The Minister was able to caricature those people and portray them as people who sit at home waiting for dream jobs, not people who have been pauperised by the system and lack of opportunity, lack of child care and so on. I do not need to make the point about child care because it has been well articulated. It is fair enough if a person can access child care, then they can get some benefit from the new system but if one has not the means to do that and a mother or mother-in-law is minding the children, or if one is a stay-at-home mother, then those people are not benefitting from those provisions. It is completely wrong that a huge emphasis is being put on these in many ways false training schemes, such as the Gateway projects. People who worked all their lives and paid their contribution to society are being forced to sign up to schemes with local authorities to pick up litter while jobs in the operative sections in local authorities are being diminished. Young people leaving school cannot ever aspire to a manual job in a council or in a government building where, even if they did not get their leaving certificate, they might be able to move up through the ranks and have the audacity to think they could have a roof over their heads and their kids would get an education.

We now have the irony of a society with more wealth than it has ever had, but it is in a smaller number of hands and there are greater levels of inequality than ever before. To me, this is utterly reprehensible. I honestly think we are demeaning people. We are degrading them in the manner we treat them and they interface with social services. It is not right. I was going to read a quote from the end of the film which sums up what we are not doing, but as I do not know whether I would be able to hold it together without crying, perhaps I will not. The bottom line is what the man proudly proclaims at the end, which is that he is not a client, a customer, a service user, a shirker, a scrounger or a beggar or an insurance number but somebody who has paid his dues and was proud to do so. He never asked or looked for charity. He states he is a man, not a dog, and demands his rights and respect. He is a citizen, nothing more and nothing less. We have lost the concept of citizenship and what it means. We are not creating a society but a gulf between myth and spin, on the one hand, and the real lives of people, on the other.

I will not have time to go into all of the points, but there is no doubt about it - other Deputies have referred to it - many of the measures included in the budget have been designed to make those who already have a greater share of the wealth even wealthier. The special assignee relief programme will cost the guts of €5 million, money which I believe could have been better used on public services.

Points have been made about the inheritance tax measure which will benefit approximately 2,000 people, at a cost of €20 million to the State. The Government is bragging about the €35 million being spent on child care initiatives, while €20 million is being written off to the benefit of approximately 2,000 people, which, to me, puts the matter very much in perspective.

While the Government might state it is great that we will have 1,000 extra nursing posts as provided for in the budget, which is very good, it does not undo the damage caused by the fact that we are down 5,200 nursing posts since the recession and that there is a deficit of 17% in the number of midwifery staff needed to run maternity services which has resulted in a crisis in maternity services. Eight maternity hospitals are under investigation following the tragic deaths of either babies or women in a country which a few years ago was lauded as being the safest country in the world in which to give birth. Sadly, that is not the case any more and the cutbacks are not being undone.

Deputy Mick Wallace has dealt much better than I could with the so-called and misnamed help-to-buy scheme, which is really the give a few bob to the developers scheme. It is an absolute joke and will do no good and will probably do a lot of harm.

There has been a huge play in the media about pensions. In some ways, it shows Fianna Fáil's historic policy of vote buying from its clientele, the over-65s, in the mileage it has been making out of the issue. While it is welcome that pensioners will receive an extra €5, it is not enough. Not only is it not enough, it does not do anything to address the shameful inequalities in the pension system. It is completely unacceptable. A full contributory pension is being denied to thousands of Irish women and some men, some of whom worked 30 or 40 years, because they did not engage in paid work for periods of their working lives for a variety of reasons. It might have been because they were caring for children, because they had volunteered abroad or because they were suffering from depression. Whatever the reason, in many cases women, in particular, were forced out of the workforce by the marriage bar and now in their later years they are being punished again by the failure of the Government to redress this inequality. They are being punished with reduced pensions. Many of these women re-entered the workforce after their children had been reared but because their contributions were based on an entire working life, they will not receive the full benefits. Meanwhile, people who did not work all of their lives and only started to work at, for example, 54 years of age and made PRSI contributions for ten years will receive a full pension. Others who, in some instances, worked 30 years will not. This is ludicrously unfair and I do not see why the Government will not correct this unfairness. It is completely wrong. The Minister for Social Protection, Deputy Leo Varadkar, plans to introduce a new total contribution system to correct the unfairness, but the plan is to introduce it by 2020 when, sadly, some of the women and men who would benefit from it may not be around. This is particularly the case because the Minister has stated he will not backdate the scheme. Many of the people who find themselves in this situation will not benefit, which is completely wrong. I will briefly read from a letter from a constituent who wrote to the Minister about this issue to show how disappointed she is it that is not being addressed.

Your response gives no understanding of the circumstances which could have led to women having atypical PRSI contribution histories. These were often due to societal expectations on women such as rearing and caring for children both healthy or suffering from intellectual or physical impairments. As the parent of an intellectually impaired daughter I could teach you a few facts on that score. Not alone was there a dearth of childcare facilities but there were even less facilities for those with such impairments. Include into this mix those women who were required to care for elderly or ailing parents and a clear picture of the impossible position which women were placed in back in the late 1960s and early 1970s begins to appear. Now those same women who were relied so heavily on by the State to give their time post-marriage to caring duties are being penalised heavily and shamelessly by the same State. It defies all reason and demonstrates neither empathy nor understanding of the circumstances which led to the atypical contribution history of [these women].

I could not put it better myself. When we speak about looking after older people, equality and a new Ireland, let us start dealing with the matter for real and deal with the women who brought the country to where it is, who reared and looked after others and who are not in any way getting the benefit.

I have many more points to make. I want to speak about the shameful waste of giving further taxpayers money to Horse Racing Ireland, representatives of which will appear before the agriculture committee tomorrow, and the greyhound industry, a diminishing industry which has shamed us internationally for its appalling treatment of greyhounds. There are so many examples where we could have spent the money better.

The budget is a missed opportunity. It is stunningly unambitious and incredibly dull in its content. It will not do anything to address the fundamental inequalities which the Government has served to increase rather than reduce.

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