Mary White (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

There are many aspects of the budget that remind me of the debacle of the budget introduced by the then Minister for Finance, Mr. John Bruton, when he imposed a tax on children's shoes. The cuts to older people in this budget are of the same order. Each one of us is getting older day by day and there is an increasing number of older people in society. As people get older they will have more health needs. The budget changes will leave older people struggling to pay for health care and heat in their homes. Those are the two issues on which I wish to focus. The trebling of the prescription charge from 50c to ¤1.50 per item on a prescription will hit the poor, the sick and the old the hardest. That increase combined with a ¤12 increase in the income threshold for the drugs payment scheme to ¤144 per month means that many more older people will struggle to pay their medicine bills.