Pádraig Mac Lochlainn (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I would recommend that, at the earliest opportunity, the Minister of State watches this film. It will be the best two hours of her life, especially as a Minister of State who represents a working class community in Dublin. It is a film directed by the wonderful Ken Loach, who has done much for Irish history with some of the films he has made about our island. "I, Daniel Blake" is the story of one decent human being who is driven demented by a system that is heartless, that is results driven and that takes away the uniqueness and the humanity of the person, in this case a person who had worked all his life. To give away some of the film, he has a heart condition and can no longer engage in physical labour. They push him into all sorts of schemes and break him down, and take away his money and his supports. It is a vital film for people in government to watch, to remind themselves about their responsibility to be decent, to look after human beings and to understand that there but for the grace of God, go I. People who find themselves unemployed are supposed to have solidarity and assistance, not a one-size-fits-all approach.

Before I became an elected representative, I used to be an activist with the Irish National Organisation of the Unemployed, INOU, which is a superb organisation. What I learned from it was about solutions. It came up with the idea of the back to work allowance scheme and the enterprise allowance scheme, which have very good, solutions-oriented approaches. One of the things the INOU taught me, and which I thought it had taught the Government, was that a one-size-fits-all approach to people in unemployment does not work. A tailor-made approach is needed for each individual. They need to sit down with a human being - not the customer, but the human being who is in front of them - the person who deserves dignity, who is a citizen and who has often worked most of their life and paid taxes. They need to sit down with those people to look at their skills and abilities and try to find a job, or a CE scheme or Tús scheme, that suits the people and that serves society's and their best interests.

That is not what this scheme is about. It has simply passed on from right-wing politicians to private companies the responsibility that should be the State's. Of course, those private companies, like all private companies, are driven by profits, by results and by ticking the boxes to earn another contract down the line. That is entirely wrong. It is not the way to do social policy. Unfortunately, we see in some - I want to be clear I mean "some" - of the people who work in the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection the length and breadth of this State the way they treat people who find themselves in unemployment, as I have found myself in my life, looking down their noses at them like they are dirt. It is not acceptable. I think there is a certain mentality in politics and in the Civil Service that sees those who are unemployed as people who have to go into a category which is then given to a private company - we could not possibly do this ourselves, but a private company can do our dirty work for us. That is what is happening here. Let us call it out for what it is.

The other issue is in regard to community employment schemes and Tús schemes. I, and many others, have come across places in this State which are struggling the find participants because people are being forced into this approach. These CE and Tús schemes perform a vital role in our communities across the State. I will refer to County Donegal, which I know best, but this applies as well to all the other communities in the State. If it was not for the community organisations in my county, I do not know where we would be. We were economically devastated. CE and Tús schemes are a practical way of helping to deliver services to communities while upholding the dignity of the human beings who participate in those schemes.

I go back again to Daniel Blake. I ask the Minister of State and the former Minister who introduced this, Deputy Joan Burton, although I do not see any of her colleagues present, to watch "I, Daniel Blake" and to rediscover their humanity and decency. They should watch that movie and understand that it is our job in politics and in government to treat every single human being, every single citizen of this State, with dignity and with respect, and to find a solution to their problems. Let us not take that away. That is what this scheme does. It is right-wing, it is cold-hearted and it is totally unacceptable.