Jerry Buttimer (Fine Gael)

If the Senator checks the records, he will find that John Bruton actually increased child benefit. This Bill is a fundamental attack on children and women. When I was growing up, my mother would get the children's allowance and go into town on the first Tuesday of each month. She would pick up the money and spend it on something for us. That is what it was about. That is replicated across every community in this country. Women use that money for their families.

In advance of the 1987 general election, the late Hugh Coveney, God rest his soul, made a comment on the old "Frontline" programme that may have cost him his seat. He was partly right when he said he did not need children's allowance, as it was then called, because of his income. Perhaps we should examine the universality of child benefit, but we should not engage in an attack such as that proposed in this Bill. We are all advocates of various special interest groups.

As an educator, the Minister, Deputy Hanafin, will understand the benefit of educating children so that they can be healthy and prosper. We are dismantling that again. This section of the Bill follows the same trend as the decisions of the Minister, Deputy Batt O'Keeffe, to cut the leaving certificate applied programme, reduce places, increase the pupil-teacher ratio, place an embargo on recruitment and freeze posts of responsibility.

How can people survive? Senator Donohoe spoke eloquently about the cost of child care. My brother and sister and others could speak about the same thing. This part of the budget is taking from people the discretionary money they used to pay bills, etc. That money was the lifeline that allowed people to survive at a certain level.

People are in trouble as a result of the reduction in private sector pay, the problem of negative equity, last year's cut in public sector pensions and this year's taxation decisions. I suppose we have all signed up to the Green Party's great model of carbon tax.