Mary Hanafin (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)

As I indicated, we have protected pensioners; there has been no change in respect of them. We have protected children in families dependent on social welfare who are in receipt of family income supplement. Those families will not experience any drop in income as a result of the cut in child benefit. We have also tried to ensure, despite the difficult decisions that were made, that we kept the cuts at a minimum for all other groups, bearing in mind the increases that have been given in previous years, particularly the increase given this year. That increase was given in anticipation of an inflation of 2.5%. As we know, however, we did not get inflation; we got deflation and whereas undoubtedly there are people who benefited more from the drop in prices than others, for example, people with mortgages benefited hugely but the price of food, clothing and energy has come down as well. People on social welfare payments and people who are unemployed-----