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

That is fantastic. I am very happy to hear that. I will call my constituent who has been battling away on that issue immediately once I am out of the Chamber. He will be delighted. The €5 and the increase in means test thresholds are still extremely minimal, but we will take them. You have to put pressure on in this place. It takes a long time to get even a fiver for people.

I will speak more generally then. I refer to what has become an annual tradition, that of the €5 increases in social welfare payments, which the Government expects people to be somewhat happy about when they fail to keep pace with inflation. Inflation is now running at approximately 5% across the European Union. We are heading towards that level in Ireland. The consequence of that for people on social welfare is that they get a cut in real terms to their incomes. It is interesting to look at the basic social welfare rates across the board in contrast with the €350 for the PUP, which the Government tried as quickly as possible to row back from. That demonstrated an important truth, that is, that when a very large number of people, including significant sections of the voting bases of Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, were faced with going onto social welfare benefits, effectively, in the form of the PUP, it was accepted that the minimum for any sort of standard of living was €350. Then the attempt was to get away from that and to go back to €203, the normality - quite an incredible normality - of poverty-level welfare payments. That is not good enough, and one of the basic lessons to be learned from Covid should be that if people are to be on social welfare payments, people should actually be able to survive on them. That is why, in People Before Profit's budget 2022 statement, we proposed a €25 increase in welfare payments, well ahead of inflation, to lift people's standard of living as a step towards raising all welfare levels, including carer's payments, recipients of which suffer incredible levels of poverty and do a huge amount of effectively unpaid work for the State, up to a basic €350.

As for maternity benefit, the proposed €5 increase has an added insulting element to it. Prior to January 2014, 90% of women qualified for the higher rate of maternity benefit of €262. That was before Labour and Fine Gael scrapped the rate in question. Today, the Government is giving a €5 increase to bring the rate to €250, but that is still way behind the 2014 levels, while prices have gone up massively. In reality, the entire maternity benefit system needs to be transformed. The system sees women looking after newborn babies getting an income below the poverty line, €100 less a week than the €350 PUP when it was at that rate. Instead, we need to move to a system of full parental benefit for both parents to ensure that new parents will not have to take a cut in income at precisely the time they need their full income most. Instead, we should push for paternal benefit to be paid by employers in line with a worker's wages.

Another issue I wish to raise is long Covid, which I suspect will rise up the political agenda in the coming months and, unfortunately, years. Long Covid now needs to be taken into account across a range of public services, including health and social protection. There is nothing in the Bill to support those with long Covid. During the week, I was talking to a professor who said he thinks that, at a minimum, one in ten people who get Covid suffer from long Covid. Obviously, not everybody with long Covid will suffer it extremely severely and for years and years to come. There is a spectrum. However, many who recover from Covid discover that they have long-term, ongoing difficulties with breathing, low energy levels, fatigue, etc. Many have had to leave their jobs or move to part-time jobs as a result, with no idea - and this is part of what is scary for them - as to how long the condition will last. At the moment, however, they are not eligible for occupational injury benefit, disability allowance or invalidity pension because long Covid is not included on the list of conditions covered. In other cases, they do not qualify because we do not yet know how long-term their symptoms are. We need to act on this before more and more people have long Covid. Probably about 55,000 people either have suffered or are still suffering from long Covid in this country. Unfortunately, that figure is going to rise.

My final point concerns discrimination against young people. The separate lower rates of social welfare payments for young people were a scandalous measure to have brought in. It is awful that this Bill continues with unfair discrimination against young people. In the future we will look back and ask how on earth we ever allowed social welfare to discriminate between people on the basis of age. Why should a 19-year-old worker who loses his or her job be entitled to less support than a 29-year-old in the same position? In the past, lower wages and worse conditions for women were justified by right-wingers with the assumption that women would have a man to support them. Now, discrimination against young people is similarly justified on the grounds that they should turn to the bank of mummy and daddy. That may be a possibility for some but, certainly for those whom I represent, it is largely not possible and certainly not fair to expect. We should move immediately to abolish the discrimination across the board, as People Before Profit proposed in our budget statement for 2022.

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