Brian Hayes (Fine Gael)

There are demographic arguments. It is true that we have a considerable number of people in the under-25 category but it is interesting that countries such as Britain, which has quite similar demographics to ours, has much better figures. Historically, Britain has benefited from the national health service and other forms of social expenditure that we have not implemented. We are still rock bottom when it comes to social spending, whether it is on social welfare, housing, education or a myriad of other areas. While we all accept that exceptionally large sums of money have been available in recent years, we are coming from a low base. That needs to be recognised when trying to frame our social welfare policy.

I have great sympathy for the Minister in her new role. As somebody who did his best to understand the complexity of social welfare policy for two years, I realise that her Department is huge and largely administrative in nature. The Minister finds herself administering schemes that have been established willy-nilly by many Ministers for social welfare since the consolidation Acts were first passed around the 1960s. She faces a problem in that a change to one scheme will clearly have an adverse effect on another. This is not how we would devise social welfare policy if we were to start afresh. If we were to do so, we would have a totally new approach.

The Minister is in the first year of her term as Minister with responsibility for social welfare. A significant part of this responsibility involves making sound arguments to the Department of Finance every year to get money that will allow for changes to be made. Her job should also involve the radical reform of social welfare policy. I am not speaking from an ideological perspective, from the left or the right, but there needs to be a systematic root and branch reform of the way in which we administer social welfare policy.