Michael Fitzmaurice (Roscommon-Galway, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Acting Chairman. I will not hold the House too long. I welcome the opportunity to speak on the Bill. I welcome the increase that will apply to pensioners and others in receipt of social welfare. There are some worries, however. As every Deputy is aware, there are people in the State who might have worked for a few years and put up a few stamps or they may not have put up stamps and got back into work later on. When they apply for their pension they are basically cut because their contribution is averaged out over the number of years. This is a problem for them and it needs to be addressed. I am aware that a scheme was brought in, and rightly so, where if a person in the farming community had paid in for the past ten years he or she could get that pension. We need to address the anomaly. There will be another Bill to address the issues of women in the State who had to give up work, and those who stayed at home to care for their children. Instead of being rewarded for the service and for what they did for their country they are now being penalised, which is absolutely disgraceful. I am aware that the Government has a Bill coming in to address that, but I hope it is not just tightened up and left in a way that is impossible to get to.

Deputy Ó Cuív referred to employing people. I would say that 99.9% of employers do not phone JobPath. They try to suss out someone in a local area who is fit to do a job and they employ that person.

That is not the way it works in the SME sector or in small businesses around the country. A lot of them would not even be registered with the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection to get this. As was pointed out, there is a major problem. It happened a year ago and it is coming again this year now that Christmas is coming. I remember speaking to the Minister about it. We cannot put a price on it. It is great that our tourism figures are gone up. It is great that the number of people coming into the country is rising. However, we must tackle a problem that is happening right around the country and especially in the rural areas, in the community employment, CE, schemes and the Tús schemes. That problem is not having people to do work in the Tidy Towns. We talked about sports facilities but a great amount of work is done by Tidy Towns. Tourists drive around Ireland and look at our towns.

Deputy Ó Cuív said we have 100,000 long-term unemployed. It is a sad damnation on the Department that there are Tidy Towns committees that have to pay people to do the work because Joe, Mary, Tom or Pat does not qualify because their year is up or for whatever reason. That should not be allowed. I am a firm believer that if people are unemployed, for the sake of their own mental health and feeling involved in a community, for the €20 a week or whatever they get they would be better off out doing something than being inside a house. It would cost more because we would need a few supervisors or whatever but the payback to the country in all those areas - cities, towns and small villages in rural areas - would mean we would be gaining from what had been achieved. It is good that people are getting more work. There is no-one criticising that. It is good that the economy is picking up but with that comes situations such as what we are dealing with now. Five or six years ago, we would have had plenty of people for CE schemes or FÁS schemes but now the criteria are beating us. At the moment if a committee has not got somebody and it makes an application for Joe who is a great fellow, or Mary, saying it wants to keep them on, Joe or Mary do not qualify. That one thing would help so many people.

On top of that there is the well-being of those people to be out talking to someone, doing a bit of work. It is absolutely crazy that we do not give that opportunity to them. If that was the only thing we looked at in the next few weeks I ask Ministers to do so. Especially in small rural villages, people are crying out trying to keep their villages in good nick. They are volunteers and they cannot get someone on the CE schemes. The rural social scheme has been a great success. We need more people on it. It keeps a lot of family farms viable in rural areas and a lot of work done.

There is one part of social welfare that I can never understand. If somebody was working, in Dublin or anywhere else, and for the love of his or her mother or father, if one of them got sick, the person would go home to help care for that parent. Say the woman's husband was on whatever amount or on the income threshold, and she wanted to look for carer's allowance to mind her loved one, she will be refused carer's allowance. By the way, giving it to her could save the State probably €800 a week even though it cannot see that, because if the parent was in a nursing home it would cost that. If the woman shows she is giving something up, I cannot understand for the life of me how she would be refused when the State is saving money. If they decided to bring the parent to Dublin to a nursing home, what would the figure be then? It would probably be €1,200 or €1,400. I cannot understand why we are doing stuff like that.

There is a need to take care of the self-employed as well, for example if they get sick. Generally we have seen down through the years how an employee would rightly qualify for some provision but the self-employed person would have to go through the rigours of everything to try to keep food on the table. We need to respect those who are self-employed. I welcome the tax measures in the budget for self-employed people and see that we are starting to move another bit in the line of balancing it. I think it has gone up €230 and one more round might get it level with the tax credit for the €1,650. That is welcome. We need to make sure for those people who take risks that if something goes wrong there is a back-up plan.

I am not going to hold the Minister of State, Deputy Finian McGrath, all night. I believe the Minister of State, Deputy Phelan, is looking to get in. I ask the Minister of State to look at those CE and Tús schemes because they are crucial. We are going to see this backfiring because there will be towns that will do less well than they are doing at the moment. Ireland is relying a lot on tourism, especially in the west, and we do not want to have anyone saying a place was dirty or there were papers lying around, or the flowers were not done. A great amount of work is done and I cannot fathom how it does not cost an awful lot extra. Let us look at ways of making sure it is efficient in the way it is done but for people who are unemployed there should be a system in place so that they are given that facility. What it does for them as well down the road is a help.

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