Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I accept the Minister will not think of this in the same way that I do but in so far as we have our gender in common, on a daily basis we are faced with a barrage of elements of discrimination in this society, the latest being the revisiting of the debacle that Joanne Hayes faced in 1984 because of the Kerry babies issue. The question that jumps out is this: why it is recognised that women leave the workforce and rear children for those after 1994 but not for those before then. As we speak and was mentioned by other Deputies, there are people across the road in Buswells Hotel having a press conference. One of them is a woman from Kildare called Joan McLoughlin who left the workforce in the 1970s to rear her family. She has been very active in Pensioners for Equality, who had the last protest outside the Dáil. She was reported in a local newspaper in Kildare, from where she comes, as having said it is not about her, she runs a B&B and is not too badly off but she is down €55 a week on her old age pension. However, she said, others are worse off. She said one lady she was speaking to said when she goes back home she has to count out the pieces of coal. She said, imagine in 2018 having to count every piece of coal and that is the reality for some people: it is. There are pensioners living in poverty and many of them are women because they did the job that was expected of them, which was to be mothers and to rear their family. I know the Minister wants to fix it and that she will try to fix it and she has said she will have to find new money. She should remember that we are living in an obscene society-----

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