Bernard Durkan (Kildare North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I am delighted to have an opportunity to speak on this important Social Welfare Bill. It is the first Social Welfare Bill in many years where a Government was able to give something, even though small, back to the people after such a long hard haul. There is no use in people saying one group experienced hardship more than another. Everybody experienced hardship, including those who are young, those who are unemployed, those are middle aged, those who are elderly and, in particular, those with special needs, as Deputy O'Sullivan stated. They continued this battle in the coldest and hardest of times. They fought on in the hope things would get better. Eventually they are beginning to turn and they are getting better.

It is a shame we cannot repay them all at the same time because unfortunately we cannot do this. It is all very fine for people to say if we did this and increased taxes and did several other things, it would be much better and we would be able to recover overnight. I am afraid if we tried the option of recovering overnight, we would find ourselves back where we were before. Sadly and unfortunately, if we find ourselves back in that particular trench it will not be so easy to get out of it the next time. It was not easy to get out of it the last time.

I congratulate the Minister, all parties and participants in the Government and the Opposition on their positive comments. We must move away from suggesting to the people there was a different route and an easier way, and that if we did not have to pay bondholders or we did not have to pay back debts, we need not have gone in this direction. In fact this is not the way it was. Before the full effects of the downturn in the economy hit the country, I and everybody else in the House was inundated with phone calls from people inquiring about what was likely to happen to the few shillings of savings they had because, suddenly, they began to get worried about the few euro they had put away for their old age. When the bank guarantee came about, I was not in favour of it, as my colleagues will remember, because I felt things had happened outside of our control, as a result of which we were all going to pay. However, I knew that if we did not do it, there would be consequences which would be ten times worse than what befell the country eventually. There is no sense in trying to get away from this. We are misleading the people if we try to tell them there was an easier way and it need not have been as bad as it was. This is wrong. There was a worse way, and if we had gone that other way, it would have been worse and we would have found ourselves trying to explain to people why they were rifling the dustbins to survive.

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