I thank the Chairman for inviting us to come before the committee. We are delighted at the opportunity to make this presentation on our budget submission. Perhaps I might start by setting what we do in context and by indicating why we produced a pre-budget submission and a budget response.
I am sure members are all aware of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul but one or two facts might help set matters in context. We have approximately 9,000 members who are spread around approximately 1,000 conferences and branches throughout the 32 counties of Ireland. We are, therefore, an international organisation.
We engage in a wide range of activities, mainly in visitation. Last year we made over 250,000 visits to families throughout the country. That meant that we were in contact with between 750,000 and 1 million people. We make visits to prisons, hospitals, Traveller halting sites, hostels, asylum seekers and migrant workers. It is not simply a matter of visiting family households, we also visit a wide range of other groups. We are the biggest provider of hostel accommodation in the country. It is not something of which we make a big deal but we provide 18 hostels with 1,200 beds every night. Were it not for those, the people in question would clearly be homeless. Last year we opened a domestic violence refuge in Longford, one of the few in the country. We run over 50 breakfast and after-school clubs throughout the country for children from disadvantaged areas. We run youth clubs and have 120 "good as new" shops to enable both people who come to seek our assistance and members of the general public to buy things relatively cheaply. We also have an expanding network of community resource centres.
All that activity engages our 9,000 members and the annual report we produced in 2003 showed that we had spent over €31 million in doing so. That meant we were spending over €600,000 a week across those activities, the greatest proportion of it going to families and people directly in need. I will give the committee a breakdown of where some of the money went.
We spent €3.8 million on food, which is hard to credit in one of the wealthiest countries in the world. We must be some of the best customers regarding fuel and the ESB, since we spent €2.5 million on those. On clothing, footwear and furniture, we spent over €1 million; we spent a further €2.6 million on tackling educational disadvantage; and we spent €7 million on direct cash assistance — including such things as rents, mortgages, paying for funerals and all the other things people have to do. That means that €17 million, or approximately €327,000 per week, is spent on people's most basic necessities.
The reason we have to spend that kind of money is the expanding number of calls for assistance to the society. They have increased dramatically in recent years. In 2002, the total number of calls received, at our head office on the New Cabra Road, from the greater Dublin area was just over 7,000. In 2003 that had increased to over 11,500 and in 2004 it had reached 18,327. In the first three months of this year, we have had nearly 4,000 calls. In a time of apparent affluence, an increasing number of people are calling on the society. A significant number of them do not come from the normal group — those on social welfare, disability benefits or pensions — one would expect but are people on low incomes but in work, namely, the group that will receive this marvellous rise of 65 cent when the minimum wage is shortly increased.
That is an indication of why we have been spending so much. If the committee ever needs any illustration of the very obvious and widening gap between the richer and poorer in Irish society, it need only look back to last September and the number of reports from official sources showing how that gap has increased. The ESRI report highlighting the widening gap between the rich and poor was published in that month, as was the National Competitiveness Council's report on prices in Ireland. It is the most expensive place to live in the eurozone, and the most expensive for food. When it is considered that the people we are dealing with spend a disproportionate amount of their money on food, one can see the impact this will have.
The NESC published a report in September which indicated that 6,500 social houses were built, yet there is a waiting list of around 50,000 households or approximately 140,000 people. Approximately 50,000 are children, so there is a real problem in terms of child poverty. EU reports in October indicated the number of people living on what is called the median income of between €185 and €208 per week, but that gap has widened. Overall, members of the committee can see that the problems the Society of St. Vincent de Paul is facing are not in our imagination. They are very real. It now looks, based on a preliminary reflection on last year's figures, that our spend will be way in excess of €31 million, and the number of calls we made in 2004 was in the region of 310,000.
That sets the tone for why we wrote the pre-budget submission and the response to the budget in the manner we did. We compared what we had asked for against what we received. In fairness, there were some items in this year's budget that we welcomed. We compliment the Minister for Social and Family Affairs, Deputy Brennan, on the efforts he made in getting increases. Equally, we welcome the comments the Minister has made in more recent times regarding the condition of lone parents and the need to target payments at the poorest families. That is very useful. However, there is many a slip between the eye and the lip and we wait to see what transpires from those deliberations.