Mattie McGrath (Tipperary, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am delighted to have the opportunity to speak on the Social Welfare, Pensions and Civil Registration Bill 2018. It is designed primarily to give legislative effect to a range of social welfare measures announced in the expenditure report of 9 October 2018, including increases in weekly welfare rates and pensions. It will also provide for the continued payment of the domiciliary care allowance for three months in cases where the child being cared for dies, and increases in the weekly earnings disregard for recipients of the one-parent family payment.

Section 16 and Schedule 2 provide for new rates in relation to carer’s benefit. In my pre-budget submission, I supported the budget priorities of Family Carers Ireland, FCI. I salute the organisation, its manager in south Tipperary, Councillor Richie Molloy, Ms Catherine Cox and all the carers for the invaluable and unquantifiable work they do in keeping people out of hospitals and in their own environment, where they are happiest and where they make better recoveries. The organisation calls for the home care crisis to be urgently addressed pending the introduction of a statutory home care scheme. It is a crisis because people cannot even afford to get sick, they cannot get time off work and they cannot get basic rights. As we know, there are many categories of care, but it is astonishing how much "juvenile care" there is, about which I have cited figures ad nauseam. Young people, who should be doing their homework or enjoying sport, are caring for loved ones in their home. It is unfair and illegal.

FCI called for an increase in carer payments of €20 per week and the carer support grant to be increased to €2,000. It also recommended increasing the income disregard for the important carer's allowance from €332.50 for a single person and €665 for a couple to €450 and €900, respectively, and extending allowable deductions. While the Minister went some way to meeting those recommendations, she knows the job carers do as well as I do and she should not have to be told. I also called for the Minister to address the anomaly affecting carers who have no State pension entitlement and to extend eligibility for carer’s benefit to include the self-employed, as well as the extension of the free travel scheme to children in receipt of domiciliary care allowance, which is vital. FCI also called on the Government to disregard carer's benefit and fair deal contributions in the assessment of student universal support, SUSI, grants, reduce processing times for carer's allowance and establish a centralised medical assessment unit.

It takes too long. If anyone becomes sick, especially the self-employed, and they need a carer, the process is too slow and cumbersome. The Minister needs to make efforts to speed that up and make the process more transparent and more relevant to the situations in which people find themselves. I sincerely hope progress can be made on all of those issues, notwithstanding the changes made in the current Bill, some of which I welcome. The Government kept talking about recovery during the last election campaign and paid a price for it. The recovery is timid, feeble and very slow.

One aspect of the budget is discrimination in allowances. There are some people aged 18 who get them and others who do not. That is unjust and not right. According to official statistics, 100,000 in work are on the poverty line, which is bizarre. Work must be viable and it must be profitable for people to work. They do not need huge profits but it make sense that people who are working are not in poverty, if they are working 40, 50 or 60 hours a week. The Taoiseach, the Government's great leader, is always talking about the man who gets up in the morning but 100,000 people go home in poverty. It is a shocking figure. Work must be rewarding and there must be incentives. We need to correct these anomalies.

Earlier I was contacted by a man from County Wexford. An employer approached him last week who had a job for someone in the retail trade. Ten minutes into the interview the gentleman told him that if he could not earn €600 in take-home pay, he could forget it. Thee employer told him that he would pay him a good rate for every hour he worked but the man said that it did not matter, that he could forget it if he did not take home with €600. He explained that he was on a CE scheme, and earned €200 odd on that, and was able to work an additional 19 hours a week through which he earned another €350, mostly cash. He also qualified for a medical card and, through that, for school books, the school bus, medicines, SUSI grants and everything else. Above the 100,000 employees in poverty, people earn €40,000, €60,000 or €70,000 who do not qualify for the medical card or any grant. There is an inequality there and it gets worse by the year. That must be dealt with. These people are being discriminated against. They go out to work, and want to work, but it is not right that the gentleman I mentioned could say that to an employer. It is clearly wrong. I do not begrudge him a medical card or anything else if anybody is sick but what about the working man who is barely above the thresholds for everything? They are the new poor and they are ordinary working people, including small farmers, shopkeepers and the self-employed. They are getting tired of this. We must look after them because they get up in the morning. They are the makers and shakers and if they are self-employed, they also provide jobs. We must do something. Some 33% of students are at risk of poverty and 9% of young people.

The legislation also relates to defined pensions. Many people, from many Government agencies, have contacted us. They worked tirelessly all their lives for the State in Bord na Móna, RTÉ, the ESB, county councils and so on. They worked, paid their stamps and everything else and now they are being discriminated against, which is totally unfair. These people did some service to the State, they built up this country and did the work.

I welcome the extra week of fuel allowance. Under section 9, I want the anomaly where 70,000 pensioners, mainly women, are being punished to be rectified. Section 4 provides for the real time payment of deductions by employers. As an employer, which I should have declared at the beginning, that is welcome but we must give some supports. The self-employed must do this weekly. Where are they to get the man or woman power to do this? In my case, my wife is the business secretary, but it is so onerous. I agree that every penny which has been deducted must be paid over and the employees looked after; most small businesses have a good relationship with their workers, it is a two-way street. They work diligently and the business owners look after them. However, making these decisions is very well, but the more onerous these schemes are, the more paperwork and bookkeeping that has to be done by the self-employed. There is no allowance for the extra paper work. Then each letter that arrives from Revenue contains a threat of significant penalties and fines, and even imprisonment. The Government is driving people out of self-employment, and thereby losing jobs. These are the people who made the recovery, small as it is. They do not get foreign direct investment grants, although I also welcome those companies. They do not get the IDA Ireland or Enterprise Ireland grants, they just give sweat and blood, and work hard on a 24-7 basis. The Minister should think when she makes these sweeping changes every week. It takes a great number of man or women hours with no allowance. There is also the matter of cashflow. The Minister said that deductions should not be used for cashflow but there is an overall system in business where they pay wages, insurance, PRSI and everything else. Before there were VAT cycles of two months and sometimes 12 months. It is more onerous, difficult and time consuming and is unfair to self-employed people who we should encourage. Mol na daoine agus tiocfaidh siad. They will keep giving, but they cannot keep giving if the Government is going to penalise them day in, day out in the budget with little care given by officials for the painstaking hours and sweat and blood they put into their businesses to provide those jobs, for themselves, in the first instance, and then others in their communities. We cannot always make it too onerous on them.

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