Jerry Buttimer (Fine Gael)

-----or they are not down in the hair-dressing salon getting their nails varnished. These are ordinary persons who are honest-to-God citizens who are struggling.

I challenge the Minister of State, Deputy White, and her colleagues in Government to come out on to the streets and to the townlands to meet those who are struggling. It is all fine and dandy to state we must do so much. There is no difficulty in saying that. We all accept it. However, what the Government is stating here is that persons with a disability will be severely punished. I do not think the Government understands the pain and hardship that people are suffering. I do not think the Minister of State gets it. I wish she did. If she did, she would take this legislation and amend it without dividing the House, and she would save the Members opposite the ignominy and embarrassment of having to vote for something they do not really want to vote on.

Can the Minister of State genuinely explain to me why the Government has ring-fenced a particular group of people and singled them out for specific cuts? Deputy Noonan, on budget night, showed the Government the figure that could be saved by not doing this. How could they, not only as politicians but as persons, the 14 or 18 around the Cabinet table - I do not know how many of them are around it at this stage because I am not sure whether the Minister of State's party is in or out, something she might clarify - come in and make this cut?

The Government is telling people it is fine to be austere and we all have bought in to some level of cuts, but the people who need it the most are being abandoned by Fianna Fáil and the Greens. If we allow this section to be passed we are polarising society further and we are being unfair and far from giving assistance we are giving no assistance and no care. What has the Government got against the carer? What has it got against those with a disability? What is it? They do not know what they have done to the Government, and neither does Fine Gael and Labour, and we are not playing politics with this.

Every day in my job as a politician and in my role as a citizen, I meet people who have a disability and who are carers. They are the people we should have the most respect for and should help because, as this Bill states, it is assistance to assist them. Far from assisting them, we are rendering them second class. Is that what the Government wants to do? Where I come from, a budget is not about figures. It is not, to borrow a phrase from a previous Taoiseach, the late Mr. Haughey, "as cold as a computer printout". It is about people and people, to me, matter.

In my mind, I have a picture of the people about whom I am talking, and those people have not got luxury lifestyles. They are not down in the five-star hotels in Cork. They are not inside the glitzy shopping malls purchasing grandiose Christmas gifts. They are stuggling and they are watching what they spend. They are being asked to take a 4% decrease today, and yet we talk about the Taoiseach and the Ministers taking a hit which they can far more easily afford. If the Government was serious about reforming the political class, the Government would have done it much better than it did rather than picking on the people who need it the most.