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

People are not stupid. They know exactly what the Government was doing. People know there has been a campaign of manufacturing consent for attacks on the pandemic unemployment payment and they are increasingly seeing that it is built on the same sort of lies as those on which the Taoiseach built his previous campaign about welfare cheats, which are fundamental untruths about the figures. I will come back to them.

The Government has a problem now because the true face of the motivation behind this attack was revealed in all its ugly glory on RTÉ Radio 1 at about 11 a.m. today when Pat McDonagh made his arguments for cutting it. The essence of the argument is that 200,000 people are better off as a result of the pandemic unemployment payment, or according to a Fianna Fáil Deputy, "a hell of a lot better off", which is entirely untrue. The real scandal exposed by these figures is that of low pay on the one hand and the fact that the State subsidises it on the other. The State makes up for the low pay of employers like Pat McDonagh by paying people working family payments and so on. That is a part of what his multi-millions of euro are built on. That is the real scandal. What came across from a man worth more than €300 million was the contempt he had for his own workers and his attitude, which is completely out of touch with ordinary people. He suggested that people are winning the lotto by getting €350 a week. That €350 a week is below the poverty line for a parent with one child. This is a man who pays minimum wage and insists on taking compulsory deductions for food from his staff, whether they eat it or not, and up until recently was also taking compulsory reductions for uniforms, despite the fact that people might not get a replacement uniform from it. It is utterly disgusting, but it revealed that this is about getting people back to work for poverty wages. That is what this is being driven by.

I have a very simple question for the Minister. I also posed it to the Taoiseach yesterday and did not get an answer. According to this report, 38% of recipients were previously earning less that €300 per week. That figure has been used to suggest that people are much better off. However, it is not an accurate figure. The Minister's own briefing note makes clear that the figure comes from the PAYE returns, so it is purely based on what people were earning from their employer. It excludes part-time jobseeker's allowance, jobseeker's benefit-----

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