Jerry Buttimer (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister to the House. Many of us wish we were back on this day last year because, as Senator Dolan alluded to, we had full employment. To listen to some of the naysayers, one would think the previous Government did nothing. I remind the House of Mr. Seamus Coffey, the eminent University College Cork, UCC, academic who has written on the issue of income and inequality. The reality is that income growth and inequality is falling in our country at this time and as Mr. Pat Leahy wrote recently in The Irish Times, people are getting richer and we are becoming more equal. If, however, one was to listen to the chorus and crescendo of naysayers, one would think we were living in a Trumpian world where government did nothing and our people were getting poorer.

I wish to put on record my sincere appreciation to the staff on the ground in the offices of the Minister's Department who have been an absolute colossus to people during this pandemic, but also in normal times. The Minister has become part of the Department of Social Protection, which is an important arm of Government. Let us make clear what the Minister has done. Qualified child payments, the living alone allowance, the offshore island allowance, as Senator Lombard mentioned, and the widowed or surviving civic partner grant have increased. There has been a reduction in waiting times for illness benefit, an increase in the carer's support grant and the working family payment threshold and a removal of the one-parent family earnings limit. This was all done by a Government and party that is supposed to be against the working man and woman.Many of us who are members of Fine Gael are proud to be members of trade unions and are proud to be ordinary working people on behalf of an gnáthdhuine, the ordinary person.

Can we ever get a bit of honesty from the political commentariat in our country and from some - who are not in this Chamber now - on the extreme left who have no idea what they are taking about? We have challenges and we have to face up to responsibilities in housing. Let me put on the record of this House that the previous Minister for Housing, Planning and Local Government, Deputy Eoghan Murphy, was a good Minister. We are now seeing the fruits of his work being delivered. It is time we had honesty about the issues in our country such as work, reactivation measures, income poverty and the discrepancy between those who have and those who have not so much. I would love to have that debate over a period of time, rather than the short five minutes we have for it here. This increase of €4 billion is larger than the Department's budgetary allocation for 2020 in the Department of Social Protection.

The changes made by the Government are welcome. The point made by Senator Craughwell on the class K contributions for former Members of the House is one on which we should all support him in the context of seeing the difficulties that have arisen, as was rightly said. To conclude, there is a need for a real and honest debate on what we are debating today. I hope that the pandemic unemployment payment can be extended, if necessary, to people who are badly affected in the new year with the onset of the vaccination. I refer in particular to our aviation workers, those in the hospitality and tourism sectors and, as Senator Dolan rightly mentioned, those in the arts and music industries. I thank the Minister for being here and I look forward to a further debate on the issue of social protection in our country.