Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE)

I first object to the guillotining of this Bill. It is a sign of the arrogance of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael that after 100 years in power, either together or by themselves, they routinely ram important Bills through the Dáil without proper scrutiny. I suspect we will see more of it next week as well. They do it because it is politically convenient for them.

I turn to the details of the Bill. I note a sneaky little cut that the Minister was quiet about. It did not get mentioned on budget day. The Government is going to increase the amount of money that people can be docked from their dole if they are deemed not to have complied with so-called labour activation measures. The most they could be docked previously was €44 per week. This will now be increased to €90. Someone on the standard jobseeker's rate of €244 per week can now have their payment cut to just €154. The lowest they could previously be cut to was €188. It feels like the Minister is returning to the "I, Daniel Blake" style social welfare reform. Her attempts at persecuting people on disability payments failed earlier this year in the face of a powerful campaign of disabled people who overwhelmingly rejected it and the Green Paper which contained the proposal. However, it now seems that in the context of an unprecedented budget surplus the Government has licked its wounds and returned to the same Tory playbook. With these cuts the Government is deliberately burying people below the poverty line, sometimes literally. Immiserating people who depend on social welfare will not force them into work, it will just drive them into further misery. In England, it has led to suicide and even starvation among people who have had their benefits cut. If that happens here, it will be the Government's fault. The €24 billion surplus it has just means that the cuts are even more of a disgrace. Cutting the dole of someone who has kids does not really hurt the adult involved, it hurts the children more.

The Government is doing this at a time when one in seven children, that is, more than 176,000 kids, are living in poverty and one in eight parents are using food banks and one in four cannot afford to put food on the table. The public should be aware that this type of performative cruelty is the real politics of Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil. If they get back into office after the coming election, I guarantee there will be no repeat of the once-off payments contained in this pre-election budget. They will be the first things to go in budget 2026. What will remain are the permanent, regressive measures that are in this budget. The increases to weekly social welfare rates of €12 a week are less than the rate of inflation. People who depend on social welfare are being left further and further behind by this budget. Social Justice Ireland stated that this Government will leave a regressive legacy and that it has yet again resorted to a distribution of resources that will ultimately benefit the better off. There are no surprises there. We know what to expect after 100 years of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. The only answer is to get them out.

The same cuts will also be applied pro rata to the discriminatory lower rates of dole for young people. I have repeatedly raised this as an unjust form of age-based discrimination against young people. With the multibillion euro surplus, the Minister had a golden opportunity to reverse this austerity-era cut to social welfare for young people. It was brought in when the Labour Party was last in Government. Again, in advance of the next general election, let that be a warning to anyone considering voting for the Labour Party. However, the Minister chose not to reverse this cruel cut. The message from this budget to young people is "Let them emigrate", which is the same message given by Fine Gael and the Labour Party after the crash. It does not seem to matter whether the Government has a deficit or a surplus. The message to young people is the same, "Pack your bags and get on a plane." There is nothing for young people in this Bill and nothing in this budget.

Another austerity-era cut the Minister declined to reverse was also introduced by the Labour Party in 2012 when the then Minister, Joan Burton, doubled the number of PRSI contributions needed to qualify for the contributory State pension from 260 to 520. People have approached me about this issue, showing me everything they paid and pointing out that they are entitled to even less than the non-contributory pension. Other People Before Profit Deputies also get representations. People who are in their 50s in 2012 have now reached pension age only to find that they do not qualify for the full contributory pension. This mean and unnecessary austerity cut is now coming home to roost. It should be reversed. There was an opportunity in this budget to reverse it. I call on the Minister to address this with Report Stage amendments tomorrow and reverse this cut.

Other issues have arisen with the new system of pension auto-enrolment. This will be a bonanza for private pension funds but there will be no such bonanza for workers. It turns out workers will be taxed not once, not twice, but three times - on their wages, their contributions, and a third time when they draw the pension down. Employers are to get tax relief on their contributions but no relief will be given to workers. The answer is not to continue with this system, which amounts to privatisation of pensions by stealth, but to provide all workers with a decent universal State pension.

There is also very little in this budget and this Bill for carers and disabled people. The insulting means test for carer's allowance is still not being abolished, despite the inspiring campaign from carers. People Before Profit included abolition of the means test in our costed alternative budget. We proposed replacing it with a non-means-tested living wage for carers of at least €15 an hour or €525 a week. The Government had the money to do it and refused. In contrast to the Government's approach of once-off payments that will be taken away next year if it gets back into office, we propose permanent changes to reduce the cost of living both now and in the long term. These included capping food and energy prices and taking the energy system into public ownership to control the price of energy. This is totally different from what the Government would ever consider. To control prices, it is necessary to control production. Unless the State owns it, it cannot control it.

We also proposed raising all weekly social welfare rates to €300 and bringing in an additional €50 a week cost-of-disability payment. Rather than cutting employer PRSI yet again, as happened in this budget, despite the fact it was already the lowest in the EU, we would raise it and raise an additional €3 billion. We would abolish the USC for all workers earning less than €100,000. We would replace it with a higher income social charge on the highest earners and a wealth tax on multimillionaires that would raise over €8 billion. These are the kind of radical, socialist, transformative measures that a genuine left government could introduce. The resources are there to transform our country for the benefit of the many instead of the few. Not to do that is a political choice. I encourage the public to make a different political choice in the coming weeks or months and make the political choice to get Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael out.

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