Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú) | Oireachtas source

As of December 2021, Social Justice Ireland recorded that there were 661,000 people in this State who are trapped in poverty and more than 210,000 of these people are children. It is scandal in our time that we have hundreds of thousands of children being born into poverty and living their youth in poverty. What that means for each one of those children is that they will have radically reduced opportunities and health in their lives. Most likely they will have a reduced life expectancy as a result. One of the forming documents of this State is the Proclamation of the Irish Republic, which very clearly states that we, as a country, must "cherish all the children of the nation equally". The figures show that this State is absolutely failing those individuals.

Right now, there is a confluence of crises between Covid, the climate crisis and the Ukrainian crisis. Lost in all of that is a whole generation of Irish people who are suffering radically from poverty. One of the major causes of that poverty is income inequality and the figures are incredible. Over 133,000 people are trapped in poverty while working.

It is morally wrong to ask anybody to work 40 hours a week, to do their best and to give their labour and energy to an employer for 40 hours a week, and then to give them a wage that does not allow them to pay for the key needs of their lives. It is absolutely wrong that a person works full-time yet gets a wage that does not cover the cost of housing, health, education and food. In truth, it smacks as a form of slavery in our time that we ask people to work such a length of time yet force them into poverty and debt. It is not happening by accident. It is happening because of the economic system that has been built in this country.

A recent study by the Economic and Social Research Institute, which examined the distribution of income in the State, found that 36% of households reported an income of less than €15,000 a year. So a third of the households in this State have an income of less than €15,000. The outcome of this can be seen as 9,800 people are homeless currently, which is a 23% increase on the figure for 2021. Last year 115 homeless people in Dublin died on the streets. When we ask how many people died on the streets of the other towns and cities, the Government gives a shrug because it does not know as it does not collect those figures. We do not even record the number of people who are dying on the streets due to homelessness in the other towns and other cities. Yet, parallel to this experience we have a concentration of wealth into fewer and fewer hands at the upper end of the income spectrum. So the rich are definitely getting richer while the poor suffer such levels of poverty. It is due to a lack of proper payment and wages for people and due to a taxation system that allows for wealth to migrate continuously to the most wealthy.

My final point is that the Government is leading the way in this. The differentials in salary in the Civil Service is an example of all that is wrong. The wages that Robert Watt and Paul Reid get are multiples of what those at the lower end of the Civil Service experience. The Government itself is leading the way to wealth inequality where it is the employer.

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