Mick Barry (Cork North Central, Solidarity) | Oireachtas source

The Government trumpeted the budget as awarding the princely sum of €5 a week to people on social welfare, although they have to wait until March to get it. However, Social Justice Ireland’s verdict on the budget is that it lacks any serious initiatives to begin to significantly reduce poverty and that the Government’s choices and priorities have given the least to single, welfare-dependent households and those on the lowest earnings. Nobody is going to get too excited about a fiver but when we put it in context of the scale of poverty and inequality in this country, it is even less impressive.

I will provide some information on the scale of poverty and inequality. Some 780,000, including 250,000 children, are poor.

That is one in six of the population and almost one in five children. Nearly half of those, 8.3%, are living in consistent poverty. Some 100,000 of those at risk of poverty are workers with jobs. One in five workers is on low pay. Students, mainly young people, have nearly twice the risk of poverty of the general population at 30% as opposed to 16.5%. Disgracefully, 39% of people with disabilities are poor.

The latest available figures for 2016 show rents so out of control that 14.3% of private sector renters paying market rents are living in consistent poverty. This is a massive increase compared with 2011 when 6.8% of private renters were in consistent poverty. As those are 2016 figures, I suspect it must be even higher now. Some 22% of people renting below market rate or rent free - mainly people paying differential rents in council housing or HAP - are living in consistent poverty, showing the failure of the Government’s social housing and social welfare policies.

Some 42% of unemployed people are living below the poverty line. An extra €5 a week will do little to change this, especially for those aged under 26 who continue to be discriminated against. From March, they will be still getting only €112.70 a week in jobseeker's allowance.

Social Justice Ireland has been calling for social welfare payments to be benchmarked against average incomes. There has been no attempt to match social welfare increases even to the small rises in wages, let alone the massive increases in rents, profits and wealth. I want to focus on this. For someone on jobseeker's benefit, €5 extra a week is a 2.5% increase from €198 to €203. For someone under 25 on jobseeker's allowance, it is a 4.6% increase. That needs to be compared with the following. To match the increase in rents in the past year according to the latest daft.iereport, social welfare payments would have had to increase by €31, or 11.3%. To match the 9.2% rate of annual increase just in profits on rents of dwellings, according to the latest figures from the Central Statistics Office, jobseeker's benefit would have needed to have increased by €18.20.

Corporate trading profits, increased by 9.7% from €87 billion in 2016 to €95 billion in 2017, which is more than €9 billion more than all the wages and employers’ social insurance contributions paid for all workers. The amount of profits declared here have more than doubled since 2010 when it was €41 billion. If the same had happened with social welfare rates, jobseekers’ benefit would now be €454 a week.

Household wealth increased by 9.2% or €62 billion between quarter 1 of 2017 and quarter 1 of 2018, according to the latest figures from the Central Bank. According to the Credit Suisse annual global wealth report for 2018, Ireland had the fourth highest percentage wealth increase of 52 countries, with 118,486 dollar millionaires, 15,000 more than in 2015, including 14,353 people worth more than €5 million.

The CSO household wealth and consumption survey 2013, published in 2015, was the first and still the only in-depth analysis of the distribution of household wealth. That report found that the top 1% of households owned 15% of net wealth; the top 5% had 38%; the top 10% had 54%; and the top 20% had 73%. However, the bottom 20% of households owe more than they own and the bottom 70% own only 15.4% of the wealth. That is the scale of inequality and social injustice in Leo Varadkar's Ireland.

The failure to increase social welfare rates by anything close to the increases in wealth, profits and rent reproduces at the level of the State how the profit share is rising at the expense of the wage share. Workers are being increasingly exploited in the workplace while continually receiving less of the value of the goods and services they produce with only small wage increases while profits skyrocket.

Simultaneously, capitalists, especially bankers, corporate landlords and developers, are doubly exploiting workers and the unemployed by using their accumulated profits to invest in the housing market. This is driving up house prices and rents, and transferring even more wealth from workers’ pockets to wealthy people’s bank accounts. The Government can dance a jig, rub its hands and claim credit for increasing social welfare payments by €5. Social welfare recipients will have to wait until next March. When this is viewed in the context of the massive profits, the massive rent roll and the massive increase in the wealth of people at the top of Irish society, we can see that in reality this is a mere pittance - a drop in the bucket.

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