Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE) | Oireachtas source

My argument is simply that before the Taoiseach cuts the pay of anybody who is currently on €350 a week, he should see what it is like to live on that amount.

Everything about this propaganda campaign reminds me of the "Welfare cheats cheat us all" campaign that was rolled out when the Taoiseach was the Minister for Social Protection. It is the same attempt to divide and rule workers through the use of the same scaremongering and exaggeration about people scamming the system and from the same underlying motivation of driving people to work for poverty wages. It emerged that at the root of that campaign was a big lie. The Taoiseach, when he was Minister, claimed that the amount saved by people reporting others for social welfare fraud was €500 million. It turned out that the real figure was less than 10% of that, less than €50 million. I wonder if the same sort of creative accounting is being used in this propaganda campaign.

Last Thursday, The Irish Timeshad an unpublished report, presumably leaked from the Department of Business, Enterprise and Innovation, which stated that 38% of recipients of the Covid-19 payment were previously earning less than €300 per week. That was used by people, including the Taoiseach, to suggest that a considerable number, almost 40%, of people are better off under the pandemic unemployment payment. That is not true, is it? Is it not the case that, of the 38% who are supposedly better off, a substantial number were already in receipt of social welfare payments which meant that their total income was already higher than €350?

The article referred to more than 200,000 people who are better off unemployed than they were when they were working. That number includes a substantial number of the 40,000 availing of the one-parent family payment, the 50,000 on the working family payment, the 5,000 on the back to work family dividend and the 35,000 part-time workers who were previously in receipt of jobseeker's allowance along with their wages.

Can the Taoiseach confirm that the reference to pre-Covid income in that report does not include their social welfare payment and, therefore, the suggestion, which he has echoed, that 38% of people who are on the pandemic unemployment payment are better off is simply not accurate?

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