Gary Gannon (Dublin Central, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the reintroduction of the pandemic unemployment payment, which has been essential in keeping the wolf from many people's doors. It has been a lifeline throughout the pandemic. When it was first introduced it was set at a rate of €350 and fostered a degree of social solidarity. All those who lost their jobs or who were unable to continue in their employment as a result of the pandemic were able to avail of the payment. This was an incredible thing for us to do. As the months went by, the Government began to differentiate between who could get the €350 payment. When that happened a tear in the social fabric began to emerge.

I am conscious of how often Deputies have used the word "poverty" in this debate. The PUP was set at €350 in recognition of the fact that traditional social welfare payments were not sufficient to allow people to live lives of dignity, pay their bills, feed their families and have a degree of comfort. For this reason, I strongly welcome the reintroduction of the PUP. However, I cannot separate that decision from the rest of my contribution, which will focus on levels of poverty in this country. Poverty would be addressed if we had more adequate social welfare payments.

I welcome any increase in social welfare payments. I am sure the €5 increase will make a difference to people but will it take individuals or families out of poverty? Poverty is a great shadow hanging over Irish society. The most recent estimates of poverty levels in Ireland are from 2019. They show that 630,000 people live in poverty, of whom one quarter are children. This means one in eight people are living below the poverty line.

Poverty is corrosive to the human condition. It impacts every facet of a person’s being. A young woman who described to me her living conditions told me the poverty she experienced impacted every one of her senses. It impacted her sense of smell in terms of the type of food she could cook and her sight through the conditions in her house as a result of being unable to carry out repairs. She lived in crowded accommodation so she could always hear voices and never experienced silence. Poverty is corrosive to every aspect of the human condition. That is why, when we talk about social welfare measures, we are talking about a person’s dignity and humanity. If we are to be a true republic, we should believe the goal of eradicating poverty is within our power. We should not accept that poverty will always exist in this Republic because it has always been here. To address this issue, we need to move towards a minimum essential standard of living, or MESL, to which previous speakers referred. We are currently very far away from that. I fully accept that this will not happen overnight and that increases of €45 will not be paid overnight, but we must set the MESL as our target.

Poverty as a word can be abstract but when we think of the indicators of poverty it is what people living in poverty experiences in their day-to-day lives. When we move to the lived condition, poverty is the absence of a warm coat. It is the inability to pay electricity bills and have enough left over at the end of a week to be able to afford some sort of minimum luxury. It is parents skipping meals so that their children do not go without.

I fully accept that no one in the Chamber wants people to live in poverty but it is the intention to eradicate poverty that I question. We need to work significantly harder to get people out of poverty.

As previous speakers mentioned, the pandemic has dramatically increased the cost of living, particularly for those on low incomes. Electricity costs are spiralling. The moratorium on electricity disconnections ceased on 1 July when the weather was significantly warmer. People are cold and many are simply afraid to turn on their heating. That is a sad indictment. In the middle of a pandemic when we are trying to foster social cohesion, why can we not say there will be no disconnections this year? A couple of weeks ago, we discussed whether there would be widespread blackouts and the House had well-meaning debates on data centres. However, there are blackouts in individual households all over the country where people are afraid they will be disconnected and, therefore, cannot put on the heating. That is an everyday reality. At a minimum, why can we not say that people will not have their electricity disconnected during the pandemic?

If we accept that a minimum of 630,000 are living in poverty and close to the bone as we approach Christmas and we also accept that during a pandemic, testing, tracing and forewarning keeps us all safe, surely antigen tests should not only be subsidised but free of charge. If not, it could cost a family of two €100 per month to take antigen tests. People will not be able to afford to do these tests. They must be provided free of charge. Many of the families who avail of the measures in the Bill will not be able to access antigen tests, which will place them and society as a whole at risk. I strongly encourage the Minster to take control of this issue because it will have ramifications.

The weekly expenses allowance for those living in direct provision were not increased. The €5 increase to core social welfare payments, which is itself inadequate, does not apply to this payment and it remains at €38.80.

The allowance has only been increased twice since the inception of direct provision. The working group on the protection process and direct provision recommended the weekly expense allowance be increased from €19 to €38. This only happened in March 2019 and there have been no increases since. Despite the recommendation in the White Paper on direct provision published earlier this year that income supports be introduced for families seeking asylum, children in direct provision are still not being treated equally to other children living in Ireland. There has been no increase in payments for children in direct provision or inclusion of them in child benefit, which is described by the Department as a universal benefit. It is not universal if people within the Republic cannot access it.

Given today is International Day of Persons with Disabilities I want to spend a couple of minutes talking about some of the disability provisions that are, or are not, in the Bill as it stands. The Minister will be aware Ireland was the last country to ratify the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. There is still a shameful amount of inaction today. The programme for Government states: "Ever since Ireland ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, we have signalled to those with a disability that we are now serious about making a difference...". Budget 2022 does not reflect that seriousness. Ireland has one of the lowest employment rates of people with disabilities in the EU at 26.2%, compared with 48.1% in the EU in 2017. The number of people with disabilities living in deprivation is 43%, based on CSO figures from 2019, which is the last year for which we have data.

Indecon's report on the cost of disability has still not been published despite being received by the Department in June. This is an issue we have raised on numerous occasions. In the absence of that report we simply do not know what the cost of disability is to a person and how we can better intervene to help and provide the adequate supports. If we do not have that information we are, in many ways, putting together our budget in the dark. The research was first announced in October 2018 as part of budget 2019 and was commissioned by the Department of Social Protection. It looks in detail at all the extra day-to-day costs faced by people with disabilities. It is an extensive survey incorporating feedback from thousands of disabled people across Ireland. It was completed by the consultants Indecon in early 2021 and a report was submitted to the Government. Each Department has since examined the report and we are told the report will be presented by the Minister herself in due course. However, three years after the research was announced, the report remains unpublished. We raised this issue in July. It was requested that if the report was not approved in time to inform budget 2022 there would, at the very least, be an increase to the disability allowance of €20. This did not happen.

The budget continues to ignore the additional costs of disability people live with despite continued promises to address the issue. Though we welcome the increase in the earnings limit for receipt of disability allowance and the Minister's extending of "Catherine's law", whereby a stipend is no longer assessed as income, to include the blind pension but the practice of removing social welfare payments from people continuing their education still exists. This was an issue we raised again recently. I wish to raise an issue brought to us by One Family. We wrote the Minister regarding the case of Ms Dawn Higgins who, because she accepted a PhD scholarship, is now ineligible for the one-parent family payment and others support payments to which she had been entitled, such as the back to school clothing and footwear allowance and the fuel allowance. It is a really difficult issue that a person who goes into the highest levels of education loses his or her entitlements and must face hardship in the process. We know those with higher levels of education are associated with higher levels of income. Any group stopped from pursuing education is in a poverty trap.

CSO data for 2019 suggests 45% of lone parents went without essentials such as adequate food, heating or clothing. We welcome the removal of the inequality facing lone parents in relation to the back to school clothing and footwear allowance but there are few other targeted measures to assist one-parent families and many inequalities remain. The inequalities surrounding extra parent's benefit was bittersweet, given children in one-parent families will get two extra weeks but seven fewer weeks overall than those in two-parent families. The increase in qualified child benefit payment was inadequate for older children and will only rise by €3. In my party's alternative budget we, along with other organisations such as One Family, called for a €10 increase due to the well-documented higher costs associated with older children. The fuel allowance increase is insufficient. We asked for the period to be extended to 32 weeks as this would have restored 2010 purchasing power. There was nothing on child maintenance which we would like to see treated as non-tax payment for children with child benefit. We intend to raise these issues again next week through amendments. I am thankful for the time this evening.

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