Willie O'Dea (Limerick City, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

We will not oppose this Bill. As the Minister has outlined in some detail all of the favourable measures contained in the Bill, I do not see any need to rehearse them. I note that this year's increase in provision for the social protection budget is approximately 1.5%. That has to be measured against economic growth of more than 5%, which is what I understand the figure to be. As I will try to illustrate, I believe that with some administrative adjustments, some legislative changes and a small increase in expenditure, we could get much more value for the more than €20 billion we are spending on social protection.

I deeply regret that the old narrative about social welfare was resurrected during the recent presidential election campaign. Certain people sought to get cheap votes and attract popularity by saying that the source of all our ills in this country is the amount we spend on social protection. The depths of ignorance from which those people were talking were surely reflected in their failure to realise that jobseeker's benefit and jobseeker's allowance now account for less than 10% of total social welfare expenditure. The main forms of social welfare expenditure are payments to people who are too disabled or too sick to work, single parents who cannot go out to work because of the lack of childcare facilities in this country and pensioners who are too old to work or whose working lives have expired. We cannot forget that more than €2 billion in child benefit payments comes from the social welfare budget. I find it disgusting that anybody would suggest that by reducing payments such as the disability allowance, carer's allowance and State pension - we know about all the additional expenses faced by the elderly - or even by eliminating them, in some cases, we would suddenly have nirvana in this country. It is not the case that all our economic and social problems would suddenly end if we reduced the fairly meagre payments that such people receive. I remind the House that the weekly disability allowance payment for a single person is €198.50, although it will increase by €5 in March 2019. The weekly carer's allowance payment is €214 and this is also about to increase by €5. As I said last month, I certainly would not like to belong to a political party which includes a member who voices such sentiments.

The Minister and I did not get a chance to finish the discussion we had yesterday on foot of a question I tabled about young jobseekers. As politicians, we have to be careful not to say or do things that feed into the false narrative to which I have just referred. The Taoiseach played his part in promoting this narrative when he went after so-called fraudulent claims. As we know, the reality is that the vast majority of payments recovered by the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection can be attributed to overpayments. In the vast majority of cases, those overpayments are not the fault of the person who is ultimately forced to repay the money. Of course, fraud should be pursued and people who deliberately defraud the system should be subjected to the full rigours of the law, but the figure for fraud is minuscule. I regret that during Question Time yesterday, the Minister seemed to feed into the sort of false narrative. I asked her to explain the present rationale for the distinction between the rate of jobseeker's payments paid to people over the age of 26 and the rate paid to those under the age of 26. I admit that this distinction was first introduced in 2010-----

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