Liam Twomey (Fine Gael)

To continue where Senator O'Toole finished in regard to the Minister's comments on Sunday night, in reality the Minister has no plan or strategy so this is replaced with hubris, with big man talk from Ministers, with each one sending out a different message depending on which part of the country they are interviewed in and which Minister is being interviewed. Basically, nobody has a clue what is going on.

The Minister for Social and Family Affairs said earlier that the Government would pay according to its resources. Therefore, as we know the public finances are in a complete mess at present and the Government is down €25 billion for 2009 and will be down €20 billion for each of the following two years, this would seem to indicate that this is the start of the process of cutting social welfare over the next couple of years.

Some of the proposals in the Bill dealing with fraud are very weak. There has not been a great commitment to dealing with social welfare fraud in recent years. Where reports have come in, however, there has been a huge return. Nothing innovative has come from Government to deal with fraud, even though the anecdotal evidence we get is that people are travelling from other jurisdictions, and are even flying into this jurisdiction, to claim social welfare payments. However, there is nothing in the Bill or the Government strategy to deal with the issue.

In regard to the issue of dental treatment, which was raised by Senator O'Toole, the children and young adults who will be deprived of access to dental treatment will totter along and the problem of bad teeth will build up over time. What will happen then? What will we do with those children and young adults? It is not just this year that the dental treatment will be suspended. It will obviously be suspended for two to three years if what the Minister said earlier is true. If that is the case, this means that many dental hygienists, dental nurses and dentists will be put on protective notice. The Government has probably just instigated a huge public health disaster on top of messing up the public finances.

This method of dealing with the issue lacks all vision and is unbelievable. It shows that the Bill was a case of somebody taking 3% here and 5% there. When the Ministers sat around the Cabinet table talking about this, there was only one thing on their minds, namely, not to have the elderly out on the streets again this week and, other than that, cut away. There was no concern about attitude or long-term strategy. There is no strategy with regard to the cuts or how they could be made more equitable across the system, which is the major disappointment.

I was taken aback by the €8 taken from widows. What was the thinking behind this? My mother became a widow just over a year ago. Prior to that, the only income my parents had was social welfare - the social welfare payment to my father plus a qualifying adult payment to my mother. When my father passed away, this halved immediately, although the costs of running a house remained much the same. My mother's situation is different because we can help her but that is not the case for every widow. The Minister is saying that people in that situation can take another hit. It is pretty pathetic if that is the type of thinking going on around the Cabinet table when it was dealing with social welfare payments.

No matter which aspect of this Bill one looks at money is being taken from people on social welfare and the Minister justifies it by saying we have given so much over the last 12 years that we are entitled to do this. That is the most frightening aspect of this. The Minister is marking everyone's card that this is only the beginning of what she is going to do.

I had not considered contributing to this debate because much of what I had to say had been said, but I was listening in my office and I heard a Member from my county refer to this as progressive legislation. When I heard that I felt I had to contribute. There is nothing progressive about this legislation, it is an absolute disgrace. It hits the vulnerable disproportionately and there is no thinking behind it. The Minister will be coming back to the same well for the coming years, hitting the poorest and most vulnerable. If I was an elderly person I would be concerned that this Government is going to hit me at some stage.

The Government has failed to deal with the core problem in the economy - the need to keep people working. Although it is not part of this legislation, it is how we will get out of this mess. If we create jobs and keep people working, we can work our way out of our difficulties. Unfortunately we see none of that strategic thinking from this Government and I regret to say that things will get worse before they get better under the present Fianna Fáil-Green administration. I feel sympathy for the Greens, they should have left Fianna Fáil to take this on its own, because it is the master of its own downfall.