Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

People Before Profit. Does the Tánaiste think it is a bit rich that Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil Ministers are tearing lumps out of one another at the moment saying how much they will help the squeezed middle and ordinary people in the forthcoming budget when it was collectively Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael that squeezed them in the first place? I ask the question particularly when one considers Unite's report that, for example, the average worker has lost about €4,000 in real income over the past two years and that we have 952,000 people living at risk of poverty while massive profits are made by supermarkets, energy companies and property vultures. Will we get some serious promises from the Government about the budget that it will increase incomes to lift pensioners, social welfare recipients and people on disability payments out of poverty, in which they currently live, and that all workers will see income increases to compensate for the profiteering and the wage cuts in real terms they have suffered over the past two years?

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