Kathryn Reilly (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I regret the Minister, Deputy Howlin, has left the Chamber but I welcome the Minister of State to the House.

The dictionary definition of bullying is the use of superior strength or influence to intimidate someone, typically to force him or her to do what one wants. The Bill before us today matches that word for word. This Government unilaterally and arbitrarily decided to cut €1 billion from the public sector pay bill, and it was done without any assessment of the impact of these cuts on our public services or the communities that depend on them.

The Government is trying to present these cuts as a reform measure but, unfortunately, the reality is very different. The €1 billion figure has nothing to do with improving our public services or assisting, as the Minister stated in his speech, "... the human face of the public service ... [who] deliver on a daily basis, at all hours of the day or night, vital public services that are of benefit to society in an efficient professional way without fear, favour or judgment". It represents the failure of the Government to reach its own growth targets as originally projected in the troika programme. Those targets were missed because of the policies of austerity, which are strangling the life out of the domestic economy. They are policies the Minister of State's ministerial colleague and party members stated in an article that the Minister co-authored this week were "a recipe for long-lasting recession and disintegration". What is the response? Is it to invest in jobs and people to stimulate growth in demand? It is not. Once again the response is to reach into the pockets of low and middle-income families and take more money from them. The result of that is that more families are pushed into poverty and hardship, there is further depression of domestic demand, and more damage is done to already strained health, education and community services.

These policies of austerity are not working. They may be keeping the European Commission happy to some extent but they are hurting hundreds of thousands of struggling families across the State.

I refer to a published article in which the Minister for Social Protection, Deputy Joan Burton, said, the pressure to make far reaching adjustments often means there is limited time to discuss reforms with trade unions and employers organisations before they introduce undermining reform sustainability. That is why the overwhelming majority of public sector workers rejected the proposals. In rejecting Croke Park II, they were not only defending their own pay and conditions but our domestic economy and our public services. Despite the threats of unilateral pay cuts, they sent the Minister back to the drawing board and from that we have returned with the appropriately named "Beggars Bush" proposals. There was a reluctance to name the proposals after the place in which they were negotiated, but that is a far more appropriate name, not only because of the policy of austerity but they are making beggars out of many of our citizens, individually and collectively, because it was a former British army training barracks where the bullyboy tactics were taught to the British garrison until these tactics were defeated by Republicans in 1922.