Trevor Ó Clochartaigh (Sinn Fein)

The workers in Pfizer, Iarnród Éireann, Bus Éireann and Dublin Bus do not feel the jobs they were promised have materialised.

I have called for a debate on this topic in the past. Strangely, an unusual issue came up during our debate on the septic tank legislation. We had a very interesting debate on what constitutes poverty. Anybody who saw last night's report about the 1,000 people going to the Capuchin centre in Dublin every day for bags of food would have been taken aback by the scale of poverty in the country. There is considerable expertise in this House to debate what poverty really is. The nature of poverty in Ireland has changed in the past year or two in particular. During that debate we discussed European guidelines on what constitutes poverty. Is it having a good coat, a good pair of shoes, being able to eat hot meals, etc.? In April Social Justice Ireland published a report entitled Shaping Ireland's Future, which indicated that 700,000 people, one sixth of the population, are living in poverty. I wonder if that was discussed in the telephone call with Chancellor Merkel on Friday. Some 200,000 of those are children and 10% of the poorest people have a disposable income of €210 a week while the richest have a disposable income of €2,276 per week. A debate on poverty would be very useful and would give us a very good picture of the kind of country in which we are living.