Brendan Ryan (Labour)

Warped it may be but I have been called worse, so I will live with that. The driving force behind this was the profound reluctance of the previous Government to provide proper child care facilities.

Let us look at the numbers. The level of what the Irish establishment, epitomised by the present Government, believes to be an adequate income is the sort of figure which, in most of our newspaper reviews, would be regarded as a reasonable price for a meal in some of Dublin's best restaurants – in fact, it would be regarded as a cheap price for a meal in perhaps the nearest restaurant to this House across the road in Merrion Street. We are talking about entirely different worlds. What this and the previous Government singularly failed to do was to do anything about inequality.

I suppose the poor should be grateful because we now know consistent poverty has been reduced. An indicator of the reduction in consistent poverty is that the number of people who said they could only buy second-hand clothes rather than new ones has declined from 10% to 3%. Hallelujah. Only 3% of our population must now buy second-hand clothes. I would not boast about that.