Brian Hayes (Fine Gael)

I am grateful for the opportunity of contributing to this debate. I welcome the Minister of State, Deputy de Valera, to the House and wish her well in her new brief. I also record my congratulations to the new Minister for Social and Family Affairs, Deputy Mary Coughlan, who will bring a great sense of passion to the Department.

For the past three years I was my party's spokesperson on social welfare in the other House. As other spokespersons and various Ministers will testify, it is a very complicated Department because of the various schemes introduced since the 1960s. It is a case of one scheme built upon the next. The problem with social welfare policy is that it is incremental. We go into a budget process every year at the end of which we see small increases in various schemes, but we are not seeing a significant difference in the real lives of those who are marginalised, an issue about which we speak in our amendment to the motion.

It is a fact that consistent poverty has been reduced enormously over the past ten years by all Governments, but the major problem is that with the rise in incomes in recent years, we have seen a dramatic increase in relative income poverty. This cannot be changed through social welfare policy but through taxation and social welfare policies together. I have long argued, as have others, for harmonisation of the tax and social welfare codes. Too many people remain outside schemes because their income levels are beyond a certain limitation and, consequently, they cannot get support. We need to integrate the tax and social welfare codes. One of the ways we can do this is through the tax credits system introduced by the Tánaiste some years ago. While it was an excellent idea, we have not developed a sophisticated model in social welfare policy to direct real support to those who need it as against those who may not need it from time to time. That is a major challenge.

The problem is one of relative income poverty and I hold the view that this is an instrument of policy that the Government has got wholly wrong in the past five years. The number experiencing relative income poverty over the past six years has increased by half the number in that category. This has been brought about, not by the changes in social welfare, but by the changes in the taxation code which have greatly benefited those at the top end of the income code. It is a detrimental policy for which we will pay heavily in the years ahead.