Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I want to make a couple of comments on what I have heard in the debate so far. I welcome the contribution by Deputy O’Dea. In the short period during which I was a member of a committee with him in the term of the previous Dáil, I learned a lot from him and found him to be very progressive on these issues, but his remarks stand in stark contrast to those of Deputy Carroll MacNeill. What she said was quite startling.

The issue of inequality may look good from the vantage point that she has but the reality is very different for those outside the upper middle class enclaves that she represents. The aphorism "a rising tide lifts all boats" was changed in recent years. The new phrase has become commonly used to describe social inequality across the world. It was changed by a black American writer to "a rising tide lifts all yachts". That adjustment is correct in the modern world.

I welcome the fact that the threat over the heads of many workers who were due to retire next year at the age of 66 has been lifted and that, for now at least, they will get the pensions to which they are entitled. I am concerned, to say the least, about the commission that is being set up and its remit. We have seen, over the years, that when Governments and Ministers want to push an unpopular policy, they hire an outside expert or commission to conduct a review, scoping exercise or investigation. That provides the thin veneer that they need to implement the policy that they wanted in the first place. I have no doubt that such a commission will come back with a plethora of excuses and a veneer to cover the Government in some kind of excuse.

We know that raising the retirement age in the case of access to the State's contributory and non-contributory pension is a policy which Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, the Labour Party and the Green Party have supported. They supported it before the most recent election. When it became a hot potato, they changed their policies only because of the campaign by ordinary people and the outrage from the workers affected. That campaign will have to stay active on the streets and the trade union movement will have to continue to push the demand that the pension age is not raised because, when one reads the commentary on this issue, it is clear that the great and the good in economic circles are all agreed that we must raise the pension age. We do not agree with that. The arguments marshalled time and again to ram this policy down our throats are not matters of fact, but matters of politics. People are living longer but workers today are far more productive during their working lives than previous generations. The Social Insurance Fund has only a fixed amount of money in it, but that can be changed, not least by increasing the rate and amount that employers pay in PRSI contributions. We still have one of the lowest rates of employer contribution in Europe and our higher life expectancy is one of the reasons why workers' rights and entitlements to benefits to the social wage are weak relative to other European states. We still have a growing number of over-65s who will live longer in the decades ahead, but the lack of pensions in the private sector and the poor returns to many ordinary private pensioners are not inevitable things like the weather but a function of the general crisis in capitalism and the decline in returns for equities and bonds, investments through financial means and so on. The fact that the rate of those returns on investments made by many large pension funds has declined, and that employers have waged a war on defined contributions, are not natural phenomena that cannot be dealt with other than by cutting pensions or by raising the age to which people have to work. This should not be a problem to modern society. The fact that people are living longer should be something we celebrate and reward. Pensions, after all, are deferred wages.

On a related issue connected to the Social Insurance Fund and the insolvency fund, I want to comment on the extension on 30 November of the provisions in the Emergency Measures in the Public Interest (Covid-19) Act relating to workers' ability to access redundancy payments. That extension suspended the rights of workers on short-time or lay-off arrangements to activate statutory severance after four weeks or six weeks in a 13-week period. That was last week extended for the fourth time. It had originally been suspended at the outset of the Covid-19 crisis on 13 March until 31 May. It was later extended to 10 August and 17 September, and was extended again on 30 November. The general secretary of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, ICTU, Ms Patricia King, has said that since the Redundancy Payments Act provides that laid-off service is not reckonable for redundancy payment, the consequence for workers who are currently laid off due to no fault of their own and may be redundant in the future is that they will forgo this period of time as reckonable service. For those continuously laid off since the start of the pandemic, the period of service is now over eight months and may well end up being a full year or more. ICTU has made it clear to Government that the continued extension to the freeze on the operation of section 12 of the Redundancy Act is unfair to workers. ICTU has requested that this matter be rectified and the Government has failed to respond. I support ICTU's call. We did not object at the time to this measure being introduced as it was temporary, an emergency measure etc. We cannot continue to support a measure that is now, effectively, punishing workers and denying them the right to claim payments while allowing employers to continue to make workers redundant. The argument put forward for extending the measure, that is, that it may save jobs, is now fairly threadbare. It is at least as much about stopping claims falling on the State. The people who are going to lose out are, as always, the workers. We are told that the aim of the measure is to ensure that businesses in financial trouble due to the Covid restrictions are not pushed over the edge financially by laid-off employees activating their severance rights. The suspension of the rights of workers on short-time or lay-off to activate statutory severance after four weeks or six weeks in a 13-week period was extended for the fourth time and this has to be dealt with. Otherwise, it is a complete injustice to workers who have suffered under the pandemic.

I broadly welcome the measures on the employee wage subsidy scheme in the Bill. Although I know they are slightly technical and that the administration of the scheme is in the hands of a different Department, I have submitted an amendment asking for a report in part to highlight the extraordinary fact that Ireland is unique in Europe, as far as I can see, in the way it has operated the wage subsidy scheme and supports for companies hit by the crisis. Of course we wanted workers, their incomes and take home pay supported, but there has been a complete lack of oversight or regulation of the wage subsidy scheme and the current employer wage subsidy scheme. The Minister for Finance has made it clear that the profit levels of any company availing of supports are not an issue. This is a State which engages in the most minute and detailed examination of individual workers and, for example, lone parents who apply for State support. Consider a profitable company such as Boston Scientific which has numerous profitable chains of nursing homes, various aviation companies, airlines and meat plants. It and other global, multinational corporations have remained profitable. Many of them are using tax structures in this country that mean they do not publish their accounts here. Many have continued to award enormous bonuses to their CEOs during the pandemic, while availing of these schemes. Most insulting of all, many of those corporations have not even been topping up their workers' wages by much. They have been doing so to a minimal amount.

I raise the continued discrimination faced by young people living at home, who are unemployed and on jobseeker's allowance. Eighteen to 24-year-olds get just €112 a week unless they live independently. How any young person is expected to live independently in the current housing crisis is a separate issue, but it is important to recall that this was an austerity measure. One of the most obvious and brutal messages during the austerity years sent a clear signal to our youth that they had to leave the country or get used to living in poverty within State supports when they are out of work. When we introduced the JobPath schemes, we sent another message that told people to stay here and we would help them to take up low paid, precarious employment by forcing them, with the threat of sanction on their social welfare entitlements, to take up such work regardless of how suitable it is.

The continued lower rate of jobseeker's payments for the under 24-year-old living at home is a legacy of the policy of an era that should be called out for what it was, namely, a punishment for being unemployed. This becomes important again in light of the recession and the Covid-19 crisis because we know that young people have been disproportionately hit by lay-offs. We were told in June that half of the people under 24 were unemployed. New figures released by the Central Statistics Office, CSO, suggest that the country's unemployment rate, including those in receipt of Covid-19 payments, was at 26.1% in May.

Breaking down those results, the monthly unemployment rate for those aged between 15 and 24 was 13.5%, while it was 4.5% for those aged between 25 and 74. The figures may have changed since the summer but I believe that broadly the impact on young workers in this State remains the sharpest. For all our talk in the House recently about mental health issues, the impact of this sort of treatment of young people is punishing on their mental health, self-respect and self-esteem. It needs to be examined. We will call for a report within three months on the impact of this measure on young people.

I refer to fuel poverty. I worked on the climate action council for a year and a half, drafting a report that was based on the Citizens' Assembly recommendations. That report included serious recommendations, which are feeding into how we draft the current work on the climate Bill. There was serious argument about it but we got a serious priority recommendation that the Government of the day and subsequent Governments would conduct a report and study into fuel poverty across Ireland. That was to happen before any consideration was given to raising the existing carbon taxes. Guess what? It never happened.

Fuel poverty is currently measured on the receipt of fuel allowance but it does not cut it. It is not just about poor people, who are entitled to fuel allowance, because many working people on low pay suffer from fuel poverty. We all know the stories. Whether it is about trying to heat one’s home, run a car or cover transport costs to and from work, it impacts on many more people than the current system acknowledges. Deputy O'Dea was correct that we need to examine what we mean by fuel poverty, how many people it is impacting and the impact the raised carbon taxes are having on those who live without public transport or in poor quality housing. I have come across, as I am sure many Deputies have, couples who live together and who are not entitled to fuel allowance because they are a few euro above the threshold. That cuts them out not just of fuel allowance but of being able to access grants from the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland, SEAI, to retrofit homes and claim other supports. In reality, many people are making a choice between how they eat and what they eat and how they heat their homes. This is just not fair.

A €100 subsistence payment was given at the start of the pandemic to those who rely on prepaid energy in their homes. That is being reclaimed from them at the rate of 60% and many reports have come in to many of us of people putting their meter card in for €10 and getting €4 of energy back. That is happening now, as we speak, in this cold climate. I have written to the energy regulator and raised it with the Minister and it continues to happen. People are freezing tonight because of this penalty and it is not being dealt with.

I agree it is a shame that we are not raising the benefits to our pensioners in this budget and have not done so. As was pointed out by an earlier speaker, inflation on ordinary items - not on yachts - has risen substantially over the past few years. We may say this has to be done because of the Covid crisis and the subsidies that were paid out, but we missed an opportunity, Maybe we could still address it by going back to the very wealthy and those who benefit from the crisis, that is, high-tech companies, the pharmaceutical industry and other industries whose profits rose during the crisis, and require them to pay a Covid solidarity tax. That could be how we retrieve the income, rather than hitting the poorest section of society again.

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