Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

That will do me. I apologise that I have not had a lot of time to listen to the discussion because I have been tied up at the finance committee. I will raise a number of issues which may or may not have been raised already. Some of them will certainly have been raised but two of them may not have been.

On an issue that probably has been raised, I want to add my voice to the chorus of objection and protest on the discriminatory jobseeker's' payments for the under-26s. I cannot overstate my anger and frustration at the discriminatory jobseeker's allowance rate applying to young people. It is absolutely retrograde in the extreme when the number of young unemployed people is disproportionate to the overall employment level. It is still extremely high notwithstanding some improvement in the overall unemployment situation. The number of young people unemployed is still very high and we continue to have very significant emigration of young people. I do not have the figures in front of me. The CSO's report on emigration from the country shows we have a very high proportion of graduates leaving this country for a combination of reasons, including low pay and the apartheid system of two tier pay rates for teachers and nurses.

This is another example of discrimination against young people. We said at the time that the recession had been used as an excuse to do things the Government might not otherwise have got away with during a normal period to try to ratchet down wages for young people and, as a consequence, wages overall and social welfare payments. Essentially, it exploited a dire crisis to ratchet down wages and social welfare entitlements.

The budget is now famously known as the €5 budget, a pathetic amount for ordinary jobseekers and pensioners who, I would like to remind the House, the Minister of State and the public, are still worse off than they were back in 2008. If that was not unfair and bad enough, young people are considerably worse off, on a half rate or a two thirds jobseeker's payment rate, depending on their age and whether they are under 26 years. This discriminatory and unacceptably low level of jobseeker's support for unemployed young people is one of the many contributory factors to youth homelessness. Social welfare payment levels being as low as they are in general contribute to homelessness because rents are absolutely out of control. As we know, even if people receive rent allowance, many of them must make under the table payments out of their main social welfare payments to sustain a roof over their head, leaving them in an impossible position. In many cases, this ultimately drives them into homelessness. If all of this is true of the general cohort of people on jobseeker's payments, it is doubly true of those on a half rate or a two thirds jobseeker's payment rate, as young people are. It is utterly disgraceful discrimination, against which I wish to protest.

The budget is a complete missed opportunity in terms of the restoration of the transitionary pension for persons who retire at the age of 65 years. Because of the doing away with the transitionary pension they receive a jobseeker's payment after retiring. It is ridiculous. At the very least, the transitionary pension needs to be put back in place in order that we will not have the crazy situation where people who are retiring after a lifetime of work are put through the ringer of being categorised as jobseekers and receive a payment which is considerably lower than the pension to which they should be entitled because they will not receive the State pension until a year later. In the future, it will be paid two or three years later, unless we do something about it because the age at which a person becomes entitled to the pension has increased, another legacy of the austerity assault in recent years.

The Department of Social Protection could have paid for these and other measures and did not have to go begging to the Minister for Finance. It cannot use the excuse that Department of Finance would not give it the money because it could have raised it in doing something about the abysmally low level of employers' PRSI paid in this country, a matter which is within the Minister's remit. Employers pay at the rate of 42% of the average level of employers' PRSI in the European Union. This is abysmally low and a major reason the State does not have the money for social protection payments and public services and to pay for the welfare state. We charge employers an abysmally low level of PRSI, one of the many subsidies to the rich in this country in terms of tax breaks. It was not even proposed to bring up the rate to the EU average. In our alternative budget we very simply proposed that there be a new rate of employers' PRSI of 19.75% for those earning in excess of €100,000 year. This measure would raise €596 million, as costed by the Department. There would be an extra €596 million if the Department had created an extra band of PRSI for those earning more than €100,000. It would cover all of the issues I have mentioned and there would be a lot of money left over to protect the vulnerable in our society.

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