Maurice Cummins (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Senator Mooney suggested that there had been a lack of legislation in this House to date in 2013. This is our fifth sitting week since we resumed in January. I think we have dealt with at least two or three Bills in every one of those weeks. Last week, we dealt with four Bills. We do not have very much legislation this week because the alterations that were made to recent Dáil schedules to deal with the promissory notes issue and the Magdalen laundries report deferred the passage through that House of legislation that was due to come to this House. I assure the Senator that a number of Bills are due to come to the House. If they are not considered here next week, they will be dealt with the following week.

Senator Mooney also spoke about the Mangan report, which we will discuss next week. Something in the Fianna Fáil psyche seems to be causing the members of that party to forget the national recovery plan that it produced as a means of bringing the country back to economic prosperity. That plan proposed structural reform of the planning of certain family income supports, including child benefit. As part of the plan, Fianna Fáil proposed:

The development of a rebalanced and integrated child income support payment system. This would provide for a universal component to replace Child Benefit with one single payment rate per child. This [universal] payment will be supplemented with a further payment in the case of children of families in receipt of a social welfare payment or in low income employment. These supplements will replace qualified child payments and family income supplement as appropriate.

This is precisely the two-tier model that is proposed in the Mangan report, which Deputy O'Dea sought to rubbish yesterday. It is exactly the same. As in the cases of the property tax and the water charges, Fianna Fáil in opposition is against proposals that it favoured when it was in government.