Brendan Ryan (Labour)

I cannot but wonder at the extraordinary instinct of the Government, which rushes in to amend a motion calling on the Minister to regulate the contract of employment of home helps and recognising the need to regulate their working hours. I thought that we all shared those sentiments. The motion also suggests providing home helps with adequate training. Who would want people to carry out all those tasks without proper training? It mentions rectifying their position. If the Government took issue with that, the simple solution is to say that it is not true and state the case as it sees it. However, it did not do so. Finally, the motion mentions substantiating a claim. I was listening via the monitor to two colleagues from Fine Gael. Apparently this claim has been made time and again, and now an unholy retreat is taking place, with no such substantiation available. It seems that the Government took exception to the last part, but what problem it might have with regulating the contracts of employment of home helps is beyond me.

We know that it is a difficult area. Let us first examine the numbers and the increase in funding from €12 million to €120 million. One would need to have increased the budget of the Southern Health Board 18-fold some four or five years ago to pay people the minimum wage, since they were being paid 50 pence an hour. Other health boards were being extremely generous and paying IR£3 an hour. Recognising the fact that this was not a token, pocket-money gesture to self-sacrificing people, I have never been entirely sure why health boards paid home helps such trivial sums. It is probably a commentary on the State's inherent view that the sort of person who would volunteer is a fool and therefore not to be recognised or rewarded in same way as thrusting enterprise.

At the core of our current State philosophy, which is infecting many areas of life, is the view that, if one is any good, one gets paid for it. If one is really good, one is paid a great deal more, and the better one is, the more one is paid. In the words of the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform, Deputy McDowell, a good deal of inequality increases incentives. Presumably, if one pays home helps badly, one encourages them to become something else. That is the Government philosophy, articulated by the Minister and unchallenged. He said that we need inequality. A fine definition of where one has inequality is where people are prepared, with little training and considerable bureaucratic regulation, to help out elderly people and other vulnerable groups so that they can live in their own homes with dignity.

For many years, my mother had a wonderful home help. She was a reasonably bright woman, and I obviously did not take after her. She was always intrigued by the number of things that her home help was not allowed to do, such as clean a window, since standing on a chair was not covered by insurance. A succession of prohibitions entertained rather than infuriated my mother.

There was a squeeze on funding after the 2002 election, when the fraud, false promises and gloriously wasteful expenditure of the two previous years were being withdrawn. The Government, in a cynical ploy, having bought the election, dumped the promises. Bureaucrats all over the health services looked to see where it would be easiest to save money after budgets were cut. As always happens in such situations, home helps topped the list, since the service is diffused and its workers usually not organised and with limited labour rights owing to their contracts often being quite peculiar.

For many years, the trades unions took no great interest in the welfare of home helps. If my colleagues and comrades in the movement take exception to that statement, I can give them chapter and verse regarding my area. Being poorly organised and with limited rights, home helps are a terribly easy target. One was giving Mrs. Murphy four hours a week but can now give her only three. If she got six, she will now get only four. The assertion that there were no cutbacks flies in the face of the experience of every politician. Such cutbacks have put enormous numbers of families under stress because they had come to rely on particular services.

The first challenge to the Minister and the Government is to produce the evidence that no cutbacks have taken place. The second challenge is to implement a service that is as flexible as necessary. We should remember that most home helps not only work for five or ten hours per day but are often the first port of call when something goes wrong for the elderly or vulnerable people for whom they care. Most are unable, unlike senior management in the HSE, to tell a person requiring assistance at 7 p.m. that they will see them at 9 a.m. the following morning. It is only the senior managers, who are paid for the responsibility they bear, who can go home at 5 p.m. and stop worrying about the people dependent on such care.

Those who provide day-to-day care, whether nurses, hospital doctors or home helps, do not believe they have some moral right to walk away from the service they provide. That is not how they work. It is a terrible pity that their role is being demeaned by the Government's refusal to accept that their contract of employment should be regulated, recognise the need for that regulation and accept that they should be provided with training.

The claim that there have been no cutbacks cannot be accepted by anybody working in politics, excepting those in the ranks of the Department of Health and Children. This denial of the facts from the Department should come as no surprise because its connection to the realities of life becomes increasingly tenuous as one event after another unfolds. It is regrettable that the Government's amendment is worded in such terms and that it fails to address the genuine problems for those who provide the service in terms of income, training and so on. I support the Fine Gael motion.