Brendan Ryan (Labour)

I had not intended to participate in this debate because our party's spokesperson on the issue, not only in the Seanad but nationally, contributed and, as always, her delivery was sensible, rational and far from partisan. That is not to say my contribution will be any different.

There are a few points to be made, however, in the light of the controversy about the early childhood supplement and the fact that the children of immigrants here, who are living in the immigrants' home country, will be paid the supplement and that there is a reciprocal arrangement in place. Viewing this from outside the House, one sees the Government making a virtue out of something that perhaps it had not thought about it. I do not know whether that is true but I know that the evidence until now was that there was no great concerted effort to inform the approximately 100,000 or 150,000 immigrants in the country that these reciprocal arrangements existed. I am not aware of literature in Polish advising our new and welcome immigrants that all these benefits are available to them. However, I am aware that recent reports, extracted from the Department of Social and Family Affairs, about the conditions in which the children of asylum seekers have to live, in some of the hovels which is the best way to characterise how they were described, have not shown much of this warmth and compassion for recently arrived new residents in our country.

I wish to put a scenario to the Minister of State, in his capacity as the new super Minister with responsibility for children. If we accept, which we do and should, that we have an obligation to the children of those who have come to work with us, assuming that at some stage in the immediate future we will try to ensure that workers who come here get the same rights as Irish workers and that those rights are enforced, I cannot help guessing, without evidence, that there are a considerably greater number of civil servants diligently checking out the claims for child benefit of immigrant workers than there were ever available to check out the working conditions of our immigrant workers. I am sure there are many more than 21 civil servants involved in investigating all these claims for child benefit. It is correct that they should investigate them, but it appears that the enthusiasm for making sure that nobody claims a benefit to which he or she is not entitled as an immigrant worker is far greater than the enthusiasm for making sure that immigrant workers who are here are working in conditions that are the same as those of Irish workers, not to mention being required, either by an ungenerous welfare system or by a lack of knowledge of their rights, to perhaps work at lower rates and then contribute to the significant wage degradation that many trade unionists and many of the rest of us believe has begun to happen. I would love to hear from some Minister about the campaign the Government is about to launch to ensure all our immigrant workers know they are entitled to €1,000 per annum in respect of their children under the appropriate age in Poland, Latvia, Lithuania or elsewhere. I look forward to hearing someone on the Government side describe the campaign, which I am sure will be launched in many languages through the labour exchanges, IBEC and similar organisations. It is obvious that the Government wants us to believe that its policy in this regard is rational and well thought out and that it knew this issue would arise. I note that an official said the relevant authorities were processing 2,000 claims. His statement that there will probably be a few more claims, now that the matter has been publicised, represents an admission that it has not been publicised up to now. Where was the generosity when nobody knew about this matter? Is generosity something one adds on when one is caught out? That is what I suspect in this instance.