Ivana Bacik (Independent)

This is a serious issue in the context of our discussion today on the budget, the most brutal in the country's history. The cutbacks will severely affect the low paid and those in receipt of social welfare. Cuts of €8 per week have been announced for those in receipt of carer's and unemployment benefit and blind and disability pensions, which is outrageous.

Having listened to the people express their anger and highlight their despair, it is important that we recognise there is a need for a stimulus package, that we support education and that we ensure there will be some strategy to promotoe growth, create jobs and aid recovery, as proposed by the Labour Party, none of which was contained in the budget. We need to learn from other countries, including Finland which, when it went through its economic crisis, insisted on the retention of supports for education. We need also to learn from Iceland. The joke, when it was going through its economic crisis, was: what is the difference between Iceland and Ireland? To which the answer was only one letter and six months, which has turned out to be more like two years. We are even now enduring the same weather conditions. One of the many things the government there did was to ensure stimulus and to ensure more women were put in charge of running the system and the economy. They have approached recovery with better leadership and government and a better strategy for recovery than our Government did in yesterday's budget.