Alice-Mary Higgins (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I do not think I am the ultimate word. I am following some very powerful and true speeches about what poverty is and they are pointing to one of the key asks. I have heard the Minister of State speak about poverty, but the nub of what we are asking for here is the idea of the independent voice on poverty: the Combat Poverty Agency.

I want to bring us back a little bit and talk about why we are looking to bring back the Combat Poverty Agency, and not just that is a nice idea. I remember when this agency was closed. It was not an accident but was at a time when we had a recession and a policy of austerity which was coming in as the approach taken to that recession. We had a period of time in which there was, unfortunately, a rush, instead of saying we need our information on poverty and independent voices because we are making very difficult choices and need to know in an independent way exactly what the implications are. At that exact time, instead, we saw a push to ensure we silenced critical voices.

The closing of the Combat Poverty Agency was not a simple measure. There were many things that did not change. Our private pension tax reliefs did not change. Certain choices were made and the Combat Poverty Agency was inconvenient because it was an independent voice that spoke about poverty and had an expertise. It meant there would be other pressures to ensure we designed our policies in a particular way and not in the way it happened, which we heard and which I can remember, where all of the Traveller organisations had their funding cut and community development projects and their independent voices were stifled and narrowed to be in a different space.

Tackling poverty is not an administrative task which we can just incorporate into one body to do another job. Tackling poverty requires a challenge to the status quo, to our political priorities and to the State and how it operates. It needs not just to be the voice of those in poverty, which we have heard so loud and clear, but a voice that can challenge society as a whole and say poverty is a problem for society as a whole. It is simply not the same to have a unit inside a Department that may look at certain aspects of social policy. The Department should have that unit on social inclusion and it should be poverty-proofing its policies, but what we are looking for here is advice on poverty-proofing. It is the challenge that Government needs and it is the fact that sometimes it is bad news on a policy. That bad news on a policy needs to be highlighted so that it can be fixed rather than the Department treating it with its gov.ie.labelling, which is effectively it trying to say it is doing its best incrementally on poverty.Of course there should be poverty proofing and a social inclusion unit, but to suggest that work would not be possible if we had an independent Combat Poverty is ludicrous. We could have and we need both. The work Combat Poverty did in the past was far more than helping us to deal with some of the symptoms of poverty. It was about tackling it. It did reports over 20 years about what poverty means for full participation in the arts and about what tackling poverty means specifically with regard to children. We have highlighted particular areas in our report, including the poverty experienced by Travellers and by those with a disability, which cuts across more than the Department of Social Protection and represents a systemic failure to provide supports. That work is crucial.

In the time remaining in this Oireachtas and in Deputy O'Brien's time as Minister of State, I urge him not simply to have a list of things that Department officials might do, when the next Minister who comes in might give them a different list of things they might or might not do. Put in place the structures, the infrastructure and the independent checks and balances that will and can ensure that not just this Government but any Government will make poverty a focus and address it consistently. That is what I ask. It is an ambitious request. We have new things happening all the time. We know this worked. Nobody ever suggested that the Combat Poverty Agency was anything less than incredibly powerful and effective in its work. Let us bring it back.

I will highlight two or three specific issues. We are at a point where we are in danger of making another mistake. The Minister of State mentioned support for the Vincentian Partnership for Social Justice. Supporting independent research is fine, but we also need to support independent voices that can advocate and challenge us. There is important work on the minimum essential standard of living. We talk about a living wage. The international principle of a living wage is about a decent life and full participation in society. The work the minimum essential standard of living has done encompasses 2,000 real items that people need every day. It is the kind of work we have seen also in examining the cost of disability. What does it cost to live? I worry that at a time when cost of living is suddenly centre stage, we now see the idea of the minimum wage come to the fore, which is a different thing. I appreciate there is a move to have the minimum wage be 66% of the median wage. That is being relabelled as a living wage, but they are different things. We need an improved minimum wage that meets the standard of a living wage, which is an independent, separate standard based on the reality of what it costs to live. Can we afford to lose that kind of data and information at a point when everybody is talking about the cost of living? I urge that that should stay the centre of focus. The Minister of State's Department needs to champion that.

I thank the Minister of State for his support for the idea of the motion, but we cannot be complacent or incremental. We need to be imaginative. When we talk about policies to tackle poverty, it also means policies that tackle those who profit from poverty and the exploitation that is built in. It is not just about realising that austerity and trickle-down economics do not work but that we proof our policies against the trickle-up effect, so to speak, whereby some profit from those who are desperate for housing whom the State has to supplement, and some profit from those who are accepting low, inadequate wages, which the State has to supplement. Let us guard against that as part of our tackling of poverty.