Gerry Horkan (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

-----and the employee pays 4%. A self-employed person earning X amount pays 4% and an employee earning X amount pays 4%. That is what happens to the pay cheque of the employee versus the earnings of the self-employed person. The difference is that the employee paying class A at 4% gets all types of benefits, and rightly so, but the self-employed person does not get any of those benefits.

If one looks at the Department's website, welfare.ie, to see what one can get under the class S contribution it is virtually nothing, except that one might get a medical card, rent supplement, back to school footwear and clothing allowance, exceptional payments or jobseeker's allowance but not jobseeker's benefit. If somebody is earning €100,000 in a multinational company and is made redundant or is obliged to leave the employment, they will get benefit based on what they paid in and, indeed, on what their employer paid in. They get it regardless of what income or assets they have or do not have. They will get paid for a certain period of time after they leave the job. A self-employed person who has paid their 4% and, if they happen to have been prudent as all Governments advise people to be, has tucked some money away will be assessed on that money and will not receive the benefit because they have some money. There is a split in that regard. I ask the Minister to examine the entitlement under PRSI.

It is important that we encourage people to work for themselves and to create employment for others. One often finds a situation where the self-employed person employs other people and those people are on better benefits than the self-employed person. If the business goes down, the self-employed person does not get anything like the benefits their employees receive. We must ensure that self-employed people are genuinely sick and are not simply deciding to stop working and expecting all of the benefits. That applies equally to employees. Very few people wish to go on jobseeker's payments if they can earn more in their private capacity. The system must make that more attractive and be less of a disincentive for people who are working for themselves or considering working for themselves to opt to do that.

Ultimately, the people who are creating jobs and employees by expanding their business are the people who raise the revenue, along with the multinationals and in addition to the other forms of tax we raise. They generate the wealth in this country to allow us to have the decent social welfare system that the Minister outlined last week. We appear to be discussing this every Tuesday evening with the Minister, as it was statements on social protection this time last week. The Minister needs the income from all of the people creating employment and from the tax, PRSI, universal social charge and so forth from all of their employees to come back into the system to ensure that the social solidarity mentioned by other speakers is there for the people who need it.

I commend the motion. Parts of it possibly do not go far enough but I support its intent. I hope the Minister will take on board some of the points I have raised.