Brendan Ryan (Labour)

It is tempting at this stage of a debate to proceed to beat the Government over the head and I am as good as anybody in that regard. It is good fun, but I would like to be somewhat more reflective on this occasion.

I wonder about the universality of the welfare system. It is no longer universal because those without Irish connections who have lived here for less than three years are not entitled to any social welfare assistance. We are starting to hear anecdotes telling of victims of poor Irish employment or bad luck. Such people are often penniless, homeless and, in many cases, frightened. We panicked in the early part of last year when it was anticipated in some quarters that a flood of people would arrive here. Such people are sometimes described as "welfare tourists", but such a species of people has not been found to exist in any country in which the matter has been investigated. The suggestion that we would be flooded with "welfare tourists" was great for newspaper headlines, to which the Government responded. It is astonishing that the system we have constructed offers a person who has come here lawfully to work and happens to fall on bad times two choices — to starve or to go home. That is not worthy of us.

I attended a committee meeting this morning at which the US ambassador was present. The meeting, which was held in private session, unfortunately, considered the plight of Irish illegals in the United States. Senator Mooney gave the members of the committee copies of an eloquent document that was prepared by a major group in the US that lobbies on behalf of such people. The document stated that Irish illegals are not entitled to any welfare in the United States because they are not there legally. I have every sympathy for the illegal Irish in the US, but I could not resist reminding the US ambassador not only that Ireland does not look after illegals but also that we do not give any social welfare assistance to legal immigrants who have been here for less than three years. We should work out a joined-up position. If we decide that immigrants who are here legally under EU treaties should not be entitled to any support from the State, regardless of the misfortune they may encounter, it is somewhat rich for us to say to a big country that is 3,000 miles away and getting closer all the time that we think our illegals there are being treated badly. I will not say any more about the issue.

We need to understand what welfare is for and what it does. I have always held the view that State income support has a number of purposes, the first of which is to protect people against poverty. In many ways, we are not doing too badly in that regard. We have used a significant proportion of the resources available to us to protect older people, in particular, from serious poverty. I hope we will take similar action in respect of child poverty, about which we should be embarrassed.

The welfare system has a role to play in the labour market. It should help people in a way that smooths over the ups and downs of the marketplace. It is a great pity that we abolished pay-related benefits, which allowed people to have flexibility in work and meant that the loss of a job did not mean a quick descent into basic living. My party was involved in the decision to abolish pay-related benefits, but the abolition was mostly achieved by the Fianna Fáil minority Government that served between 1987 and 1989. It was one of the major cutbacks in the welfare system that was introduced at that time.

Other countries which have successful economies and are as rich as Ireland can operate systems which ensure that those who are victims of the variations of the labour market do not suffer enormous hardship if they lose a job temporarily and have to find another job. Such systems involve a number of other things. Our welfare system is totally inadequate in that respect. If a person who is paid €300 or €500 loses his or her job and slips back to the basic rate of social welfare, he or she will encounter a huge change in his or her life. The State has a duty to look after such people, who are not responsible for the difficulties they encounter.

Evidence from countries like Sweden suggests that the presence of a good system facilitates major structural changes when an industry is no longer viable. I refer, for example, to the Swedish ship-building industry which had to be dispensed with because it was no longer competitive. The workers involved in that industry were able to find new employment because the presence of an intelligently honed welfare system meant they did not carry the burden of the fear of not being able to support themselves and their children.

I remind the House that social welfare is an insurance system for many people. Governments rob the social insurance coffers from time to time to pay for other things. The previous Minister for Finance did that on at least one occasion. Workers are paying into an insurance fund that is in good shape at present, unlike many of the State's pension funds, because it seems to be able to manage itself quite well.

We need to examine the issue of social welfare in that context. One cannot buy a single dinner in a restaurant near this building for the amount of money that is regarded as the basic rate of social welfare payment. That is an indication of the gap that exists in Irish society. It is inevitable that some gaps will exist, but as a society we need to decide whether we are willing to tolerate the existence of a gap of that nature. In particular, the Government has to make a choice in that regard. We need to consider whether the levels of social welfare payment achieve what we want them to achieve. They do not achieve the desired goal in that they do not eliminate poverty or protect people from a sense of insecurity. Above all, they do not do much to eliminate child poverty. There is no doubt that child poverty will be the cause of so many of our future social problems. Diversionary tactics such as talking about a reduction in persistent poverty, which have been used intermittently by members of the Government, do not add to this debate. We should be embarrassed if anybody in this State is living in circumstances in which he or she cannot afford to have decent clothes or footwear. That is the definition of persistent poverty. The Government, in its talk about reducing the incidence of persistent poverty, assumes that poverty is somehow inevitable. Gospel quotations notwithstanding, I do not accept the statement, "The poor you have always with you." It is a rationalisation and justification for policy inertia.

If we are to do something about poverty, we must remember that whenever there are debates on social welfare, there are always targets and scapegoats. These are essentially used as the example by which the system is undermined. In the 1980s, it was unbelievable how many economists stated we had high unemployment because the unemployed would not work. That was gospel. All sorts of issues, including the wedge effect, were raised by such economists. I heard an OECD economist talk about the increased utility of leisure of the unemployed. This was in the 1980s, during which 250,000 people left the country to find work, yet senior influential international economists were suggesting people were unemployed because they had a few bob and considerable leisure time. People believed that nonsense. Once we started creating jobs, all the allegedly disincentivised unemployed people queued up for them. This was before the tax cuts that reduced the famous wedge. Unemployed people, to the certain knowledge of every Member of both Houses of the Oireachtas, wanted desperately to work. I know a person who hitched approximately 30 miles between Limerick to Mitchelstown every morning and evening simply to participate on a community welfare scheme. He wanted to do something.

We now have new scapegoats, our immigrants, who are perceived to be arriving here to live off our generous welfare system. If I were a Lithuanian, Latvian or Pole, I could think of better countries than Ireland in which to milk the welfare system, if that were my intention. We have a great obligation to avoid creating a new set of scapegoats. Moreover, what was said in defence of single parents in recent weeks needs to be said. Whatever about the tiny minority of teenage girls who become pregnant, single parenthood covers a whole range of tragedies in many cases. We need to assert this fact.

Let me return to the issue of bin charges and waivers, as raised by Senator Ulick Burke. Unlike some on the political left, I believe people have a universal right to education, shelter and good health care. I do not believe anybody has an unqualified right to generate as much waste as he or she wishes and expect the taxpayer to pay for its disposal. Anybody on the left who suggests one has such a right is guilty of absolute nonsense. People have a right to expect that they will not have to bear a financial burden for the disposal of refuse that is out of proportion with their ability to pay. People must have choices, but that is a matter for another day.

On 17 December, a letter was sent to me by Cork City Council about the new waste disposal system in Cork. It stated specifically that everybody would have to pay the tax although the service in question was publicly provided and that there would be a waiver applying to the fixed charge but not to the tags, which would have to be paid for by everybody. There was uproar over this and in late January the council put advertisements in the newspapers, which I suspect cost as much as a children's playground, stating people on social welfare would have a 100% waiver.

However, these advertisements were placed three weeks after the introduction of the system. Before their placement, old age pensioners living on their own had been trying to figure out where they would get the money to pay for a service for which they had not had to pay heretofore. For these pensioners, the charge would have been the equivalent of between one and two weeks' income. They depend on waste disposal services to take away their waste. They cannot bring it anywhere themselves and must take what they get. If we are to institute a proper waste service to deal with our waste problems, it must incorporate a universal national waiver system that does not impose financial burdens on individuals out of proportion with their capacity to pay.

I have stated before to the Minister and must reiterate that I do not have any great ideological hang-up over how pensions are paid. There is much scope for the imaginative use of public resources to mesh together private and public pension provisions. However, I cannot accept that people who have worked all their lives can be left in a position in which they are victimised by the vagaries of the stock or property markets. It is our job as a society to try to use the market as effectively as possible to fund our pension provision to the maximum extent. However, we must give the elderly a guarantee that their income will not be dependent on whether the price of Elan's shares, or those of any other company, increase or decrease.

Simply saying people have to fund their pensions privately is ducking the issue. We must ask how we can fund pensions, privately or publicly, in a way that gives pensioners a secure, decent income related to the income they had when they were at work. This would lead to a good, imaginative pension scheme and link private and public provisions. It would guarantee that those who paid into a fund would not be dependent on the vagaries of the market but that they would have security in their older years.