There are hundreds of thousands under-nourished if one accepts those figures and one is coerced into doing so because of the qualifications and the background of the people responsible for them. That being so, we have no reason to feel complacent about the amount of our national resources we allow for social welfare. Even among our working community, there are many people suffering from malnutrition. The people who are working, however, have a relatively higher standard of living than some social assistance recipients.
Figures I have received from the Minister indicate that there are 15,000 children in respect of whom the State pays 5/- a week by way of social assistance. Those children are of parents who themselves are receiving incomes inadequate to prevent malnutrition in themselves. Thus, we have parents under-nourished and children under-nourished. Whatever may be the cost of providing the minimum diet to preserve our people from malnutrition in all walks of life, we have a social obligation to do it. We in Fine Gael do not shirk it and that is why we welcomed whatever improvements were given in the Budget and are being given in this Bill. We regret that the Government did not take their courage in their hands and go the full way to provide the necessary relief for those less fortunate people.
In Dublin city, more than 1,250,000 free meals are provided every year. We talk about the affluent society in which we live and are led to believe we are enjoying a degree of prosperity never experienced before. In the middle of that, in this wealthy city, we have to provide 1,250,000 free meals every year. Free meals are not provided on certain days and therefore many people have to go without them. Many people who would enjoy them are suffering from malnutrition and are unable to walk the mile or two miles to get these free meals. If they lived close by, the good nuns would take the hot meals to them under a table napkin.
The result is that we have in this city thousands of people who are grossly under-nourished because the State will not provide the bare minimum to have them fed properly. It is a fact that every winter old people die in this city for two reasons—malnutrition and cold. There are cases on record where the temperature of rooms in which old people have been found dead has been below freezing point, notwithstanding the assistance the State provides in the form of a free bag of turf each week. More than 14 per cent of the old people in this city live alone. It is a strange thing and it may seem contradictory that old people living alone in a city are lonelier than old people living alone in the country, where different forms of social visits obtain. Old people living alone in blocks of flats in cities are terrifyingly alone. Such people depend exclusively on whatever assistance the State may give.
That is why we in Fine Gael have been advocating a higher rate of assistance for old people living alone. Throughout the country, according to the 1960 census, 10.4 per cent of people over 70 years of age live alone. When you take the number of old age pensioners at 151,200, one can see the extent of the problem. More than 15,000 old people live alone, depending on the miserly old age pensions we allow them. Three thousand of them receive, in addition, some public assistance, but 3,000 out of a total of 151,000 is an extremely small proportion. These people are to be pitied when one considers what they are allowed out of the growing wealth of the country.
We have no reason to be smug about the pittances we allow them. One bag of turf, allowed each week during the official winter, is a pitiful contribution towards the relief of the suffering of those unfortunate people. It does not last more than two or three days. The result is that the unfortunate people, underfed as they are, because of the pitiful nature of this fuel allowance, are obliged to cloak themselves in whatever rags they have or to stay in bed for days on end, unable to feed themselves or to provide themselves with heat. It is pitiful to see week after week old people in Dublin pushing along their bag of fuel in a pram. They cannot afford to pay the few pence to get somebody to do it for them. Sometimes it means a walk of between two and four miles, beyond the physical capacity of such old people.
I suggest that the Minister and the Department should take another look at this free fuel scheme to see whether it would be better to provide a more generous allowance to old age pensioners so that they could buy their own fuel instead of depending on the present scheme which imposes such appalling hardship for such an utterly inadequate relief. The walk these old people have to undergo to get their pitiful bag of turf home from the depot involves severe pain for them. The real benefit of this fuel scheme is therefore negligible.
I shall return for a moment to the question of diet. What can an old age pension buy for people in Dublin dependent on it as the sole means of keeping body and soul together? The diet of such people consists of bread, margarine, tea and potatoes. I have heard Deputies unfamiliar with the problems of such old people in Dublin laugh and snigger when we try to tell them their story. I repeat that thousands of families in Dublin live on such a diet at the present time.
This is not 1845. It is 1965, and the affluent society we assume exists should not tolerate a situation in which even one family is obliged to live on such a diet. There are many families that are regarded as problem families. They seem unable to assist or to better themselves. They seem lacking in the initiative, drive and enterprise necessary to obtain employment or to keep employment, if they obtain it. One of the facts of war which we hear recited from time to time is that prisoners of war who have received an inadequate diet, even where they have not been subjected to cruelty, suffer lassitude, withdrawal and depression. I am sure we can all think of old people and not so old people who are suffering from lassitude, withdrawal and depression. We are inclined to assume that this condition is attributable to old age and to nothing else. I wonder if we should not examine our consciences. If we do, I think we shall find that much of this depression of old age, much of this withdrawal, much of this indifference of poor families, is due to the appalling conditions which we oblige them to accept. In this situation, I feel that we must, if we are to be a Christian society, accept the responsibility of bearing the burden of providing a better social assistance scheme for these less fortunate people.
The Minister has at long last in the Social Welfare Bill, taken steps to increase the compulsory insurance limit from £800 to £1,200. Is it not unfortunate that it has taken from 1958 until 1965 to alter this limit? I am not sure precisely how many wage rounds there have been in the intervening period. I am told that the total number is four. I think I am not erring on the wrong side when I say that incomes have certainly increased by more than 20 per cent since 1958: I think the figure is very much higher. Would it not have been a simple thing to provide that, in any national round of wage increases, certain other increases would at the same time be taken into account? If we are to have a system of national wage agreements, one would hope that, out of the appalling and sorry mess in which the country now finds itself because of the Government's lack of leadership and initiative in the matter of incomes, some good will come. Would it not be possible to provide in an incomes policy, where income levels generally are increased by a national agreement, that the limit of compulsory insurance should increase step by step? This is the way to avoid the disparity which has grown between 1958 and 1965 in the matter of compulsory insurance.
I am aware, of course, that some 6,000 people have continued to pay voluntary contributions towards the insurance scheme but the Minister has not given us the number of people who moved out of the compulsory insurance limit. In order to assess the significance of the figure of 6,000 people who remained as voluntary subscribers, one would need to know the number of people estimated to have moved out of the compulsory insurance limit over the past seven years. I should be very glad if the Minister would give us that figure when replying to this debate. In order to avoid the undesirability of people who were insured moving out of the insurance limit, we should be able to graft on to any future national wages agreement a provision whereunder the compulsory insurance limit will move forward step by step.
Again, we think it desirable that the contribution to be paid for unemployment insurance should more realistically be associated with the level of income which a person may have while working. We believe that the benefit paid to a person who is unemployed should be related, not to the lowest common denominator, such as we have at the present time, but to a percentage of the income which the person was receiving when working. Quite clearly, a person who was earning £20 a week will suffer a great deal more under the present system when unemployed than a person who was earning only £9 or £10 a week. It seems that the wise thing to do would be to ask for a greater contribution from a person with a greater income and, when such a person is unemployed, to provide him or her with a better level of unemployment benefit than that which now operates.
These are things which should be part of a national incomes policy and one should not divorce an incomes policy on the one hand from benefits to be paid to people while, on the other hand, they are not working. One would like to see the Department of Social Welfare, the Department of Industry and Commerce and the Department of Agriculture in closer association so that the problems of people, whether they be working or otherwise, would be regarded as one unified national problem and that we would try, by a proper welfare code which would permeate every activity of the national life, to provide a scheme which would be in tune with the needs of the 20th century.
We are glad to see that the Minister has in this Bill dealt with the problem of the congested areas. We think he is taking a move in the right direction but we do not think it meets all the requirements of the depressed areas. There are people more familiar than I am with that particular problem and I shall not chase it any further. However, I would join with those who expressed regret that the Minister has introduced as a principle into our social welfare code a geographical means test.
I think the justification for the provision of reliefs in respect of our western seaboard and other places is that people should not be discouraged from improving their holdings and from providing a better standard of living for themselves by depriving them of financial benefits which are at present available to them, if, as a result of their labours, they improve the standard of their holdings and the standard of their families. That is a desirable thing. Certainly, on this side of the House, we accept and encourage that principle.
There are very many cases in the so-called more sophisticated areas of this country, which are not regarded as depressed, of people dependent on various forms of social assistance who ought to be encouraged to do something for themselves by way of providing an income additional to whatever is paid out in allowances. Take, for instance, people in receipt of disability allowances. There are many people in receipt of such allowances who are not capable of performing a full day's work but are capable of working for a couple of hours a day either in their own homes or elsewhere. However, our code at present will penalise such disabled or partially disabled people, if, by their own lawful pursuits, they improve conditions in their homes by undertaking a couple of hours' work here and there.
There are some cases in which people get an opportunity from some rehabilitation institute or other to do some class of work but the work must be done secretly, and if an inspector from the Department is thought to be in the district, the work will be locked in the cupboard and all signs of labour concealed from the probing eyes of the inspector, lest he should arrive and as a result regard the person as being no longer disabled and therefore not entitled to benefit. As the Minister has accepted the principle of encouraging people to get up off their knees and help themselves, we think he should extend it further and not confine it simply to those officially classified people.
We are sorry that the Minister is delaying so long in providing improvements in the workmen's compensation code. We are led to believe the cause of the delay is that the Minister is introducing a comprehensive Bill to deal with all kinds of injuries and diseases arising out of occupations, but again, we have on that account another example of the many injustice that can arise when our social welfare code does not keep in pace with income and money changes in the economy.
The limit of £4 10s. as the maximum payable under the workmen's compensation code was fixed ten years ago—perhaps it is 11 now. It bears no relation to what a working person earns today but if a man is injured in an industrial accident or an accident in the course of his occupation, the maximum he gets now under the workmen's compensation code is £4 10s. This may be added to by some payments from public assistance. In some of these cases, argument may arise about the eligibility of a person for workmen's compensation and the people have to depend on whatever is paid out in home assistance in order to keep body and soul together.
The ironic thing that has been happening for some years is that such people consult solicitors sometimes about their cases and in the usual process of the law, it takes several months before the cases come before the Circuit Court and are dealt with and ultimately, if the person is lucky, there may be an award to him of £4 10s. a week. The worker is thrilled and thinks all the worry he had in undertaking the litigation is justified as he has at last got an award under the workmen's compensation code, but the next thing is that he gets a bill from the social welfare people, as a result of getting the award in court which he succeeded in getting because of his own determination and sacrifice, and the money he has received in the meantime must be repaid to the Department, the local authority or whoever assisted him in the interim.
Again and again it happens at present that workmen who undertake the risk of litigation do so only for the benefit of the public purse. Many of these people are only wasting their time, and if they did not bother consulting a lawyer, they would still get the same assistance from the public authority. It seems entirely unfair that the State should maintain the maximum under the workmen's compensation code at £4 10s. when the net result of it is that nobody except the State benefits in very many cases.
We had to wait several years before any degree of justice was done to widows and dependants of persons who made undutiful wills and we had to wait because the Minister's colleague, the Minister for Justice, spent such a terribly long time bringing in a scheme to do the wrong thing. Even when he brought it in with the benediction and collective responsibility of his colleagues in Fianna Fáil, they had to amend it and we have had it in this House in some way or another for the best part of a year. Here, with workmen's compensation, we are facing the same problem. Misery is being suffered by hundreds of workers who have to depend on the £4 10s. because the Department, the Minister and his colleagues in the Government are trying to do too much in the wrong way and instead of bringing in three, four or five years ago a Bill to increase the £4 10s. to £8 or £9 a week, they have been trying to devise some way of showing what geniuses they are by changing the whole system. Their minds are incapable of appreciating what the workers have to suffer with the limit of £4 10s.
I do not know how long more it will take the Minister to introduce the Bill: he promised recently it would not be very much longer. We are now facing the long recess and even if the Minister were to introduce the Bill this session—of that we have no guarantee—there is no prospect of its becoming law until some date which, I suppose, would be appointed by the Minister, in 1966. In these circumstances, we believe the Minister should introduce a one-paragraph Bill providing that the maximum of £4 10s. payable to insured workers will be increased in the very near future. If this is not done, we are continuing to punish unnecessarily many innocent people who are suffering at present.
Recently, in reply to a question of mine, the Minister disclosed that as far back as 1949, in the days of the first inter-Party Government, representations were made to the British Government begging them to provide that where British pensioners were living in this country, increases which were payable in Britain to pensioners of similar status would be paid to the pensioners here. On 2nd June, the Minister said here that he did not feel that further representations by him at this stage would serve any useful purpose. The British Government have done nothing since 1949 to 1965 in this respect but we feel that no harm could possibly come of it if further representations were made at this stage, and we beg the Minister to use every avenue available to persuade the British authorities to do the decent thing by their own pensioners living among us.
We pay our pensioners living in Britain and elsewhere the same level of pension as they would receive at home and it seems entirely unfair that the British Government should leave their pensioners in such an unsatisfactory position for such a long time. There is a new administration in Britain and one has reason to hope they have a keener social conscience than their predecessors and we think that a useful purpose might be served by making strong representations to them on this matter at this juncture.
As the Minister unwillingly conceded when I pressed the matter earlier this month, the cost of living here has changed, and not for the better, since 1949, and if the British are of opinion that it has stood still, we shall not blame the Minister if he tries to disabuse them of that silly notion. Anything he can do in that regard would be very much appreciated by the British pensioners living here.
The Social Welfare Bill contains a number of desirable improvements in the social welfare code, although some of them may seem a bit Gilbertian. We find, for instance, that the Minister, under section 14, is increasing from £2 to £4 the rate of maternity grant. One would like to know the cost of administering the maternity grant and how much is paid out under the maternity grant each year. Just what significance has a payment of £4 by way of contribution towards meeting the expenses of an event such as maternity? It would not even pay for the beer to celebrate the child's arrival. It absolutely bewilders me that the solemn institution of the State can continue to have such a social assistance scheme grafted on to our social code. I wonder is it even worth retaining.
