Jerry Buttimer (Fine Gael)

Is it to appease the Government's new masters in the IMF and the ECB? The issues of PRSI and the minimum wage are interlinked. If we are serious about creating jobs we should reward the entrepreneur who creates employment and we should entice people on low incomes to stay in work. The consequence of this Bill and the measures taken by the Government will be to drive people further into poverty. I discussed this issue with the Minister for Social Protection last night and earlier today and pointed out that the Government will make it more rewarding for people to remain on social welfare. I have always understood that Fianna Fáil preferred the Lemass economic model and that it was a pro-enterprise and employment party, although it has abandoned that model through its appeasement of the electorate over the past 13 years by throwing money at it. That has been its modus operandi and it has adopted the Bertie Ahern model of economics, which was to canvass from a lorry and throw money like confetti at different interest groups. Unfortunately, the rainy day has come.

The Minister of State has been very involved with employment and with workers and their rights in both his previous and current Departments. I do not believe that members of Cabinet sat down and reasoned out the issues when drawing up the four year plan and putting this Bill together. It seems to me a bit like the plan the Green Party had the morning it decided to announce its departure from Government. It seems like its members had a rush of blood to the head and decided to leave Government. A similar thing seems to have happened to Fianna Fáil and it has decided that because it cannot do A or B, it will do this. It has taken what it sees as the path of least resistance, but it is not the best path. Take, for example, the city of Cork and the nature of employment there. In many industries people are in lower end jobs, work on a casual basis, are predominantly young and come from a socioeconomic class which requires them to work. Their work is mainly manual, unskilled and often in the service industry. We are creating a new tier of poverty in this area. At the same time, we are telling employers a different story.

The Government has it back to front. The Minister of State is someone who is very much in touch with what is happening on the ground and I am sure he has got the message from the people. In the context of workers, this Bill, and this section in particular, is not pro-employment. The Government funked political reform and did not have the bottle to go further. It took the path of minimum disturbance and took a certain amount from the Taoiseach and another amount from Ministers but forgot about their entourage and about what the political class has been doing for the past 13 years. Yesterday, the Minister for Finance, Deputy Brian Lenihan, came out and condemned social partnership. He sat at Cabinet and voted in the Dáil on all the social partnership agreements. If he was so disturbed by what was agreed, why did he not speak up or vote against the measures agreed by the social partnership? The problem with social partnership was that we forgot about the pillar that is the Houses of the Oireachtas and bypassed it. I am probably in a minority in my party on the issue of social partnership, but I believe it was good.

I saw the Minister of State on television recently speaking about what Fianna Fáil has done over the past two years in putting the people first. It never put them first and that is the problem. If we did an analysis of the position from 1997 to 2002, 2007 and 2010, we would see that the only maxim Fianna Fáil works from is based on how it will win votes. That is its maxim. Its maxim should not now be that it has done well for the country because it has put it first for the past two years. That is a terrible indictment of its standard.