I am finished on that note. I want to make a point to the Minister about what I regard as a very serious flaw in the Social Welfare Bill. I have four children, two of them still eligible for children's allowances. I get £13,000 a year as a Dáil Deputy. The Minister is giving the likes of me more children's allowances from 1 July. I think he is giving us an increase of 30 per cent on the children's allowances. Whether you have £50,000 or £500 a year you get children's allowances. At the same time the unfortunate unemployed worker down in Arklow being laid off by NET, supposing he is married with three children and his wife does not work, would have a basic unemployment benefit of £58 a week and a supplement of pay-related of, say, £15 a week, and he is going to get an increase of a lousy — to be crude, unparliamentary or otherwise — 9 per cent on the portion for his three dependent children in pay-related unemployment benefit.
This brings us to the point that the Minister as the newly-appointed acolyte of Deputy Haughey, the Taoiseach, who does what he is told, must surely have within his Department some basic family income data which would suggest clearly that about the most miserable way, in terms of the allocation of scarce resources, of allocating money relative to children is to give a universal increase of 30 per cent from 1 July right across the board and to give 9 per cent to the unemployed, to the unfortunate father or mother who is out sick on long-term or short-term disability and is claiming a dependent child allowance, or to the deserted wife. I find that incomprehensible as social expenditure priority. That serious anomaly is contained within the Social Welfare Bill. Why? Because the Taoiseach wants to go the country in mid-year and he wants to stand up on the goggle-box looking bland and manicured, look the nation straight in the eye and say, "I am giving every child in this country 30 per cent in children's allowances from next month", assuming that the election will be around 27 May or the middle of June. It is cosmetic budgetary designed to milk the greatest kudos from the greatest number of people without real relevance to the priorities of social welfare. That is why I think there is a serious deficiency in this Bill which is politically popular but does not cater for the purposes of social welfare for the deprived, disabled, unemployed, sick and aged.
Therefore, if I have come in and expressed myself forcibly this morning it is because I would like to see in the Department once again somebody who would be entirely his own man. Deputy Cluskey was his own man when he was in that Department. He may have been unpopular with some sections of the staff but he was his own man and when some other Government Ministers came down from their Departments, notably Finance, and started prowling around the Department deciding what they would wish to see in terms of social priority, they were given desperately short shrift in Store Street because he was his own man in his Department. It is great to see a Minister, no matter who, being his own boss in his Department and not bending to every whim of electoral pressure from, in particular, the presidential-style Taoiseach whom we have at the moment.
I say that as a matter of regret because everybody has a feeling of goodwill towards the new Minister in his initial work in the Department, but when one gets a Bill like this and sees the break-down in the system of administration one becomes very irate. The response which one gets at times from some politicians is that. "We appreciate fully that you pay 4.75 per cent of your salary into the social insurance fund, but do not cause any hassle, do not raise any row if, having got this money into the social insurance fund—-which is your money—you have the greatest difficulty in time of need in extricating the money to maintain your wife and family." This is a social attitude which is totally unacceptable to any responsible public representative. I urge the Minister to take a fresh look at the section of the Bill relating to the provision for children and to report at length in his reply on the breakdown of the administrative system which has occurred and which, hopefully, will be put right in the immediate future.
I also urge the House to take cognisance of the true cost of unemployment. It is not just a question of paying £3,000 a year in unemployment benefit to somebody who is out of work. In real economic terms it is about twice that amount, because an unemployed person does not have to pay PRSI, a medical card has to be provided, his differential rent has to be reduced, supplementary welfare payments have to be made in certain instances and, on top of all that, one has to add the economic cost with loss of production and loss of profits for the concerns where the unemployed person comes from. The true economic cost to the State in relation to a person who is unemployed is probably in the region of about £7,000 or £8,000 minimum per annum. If you multiply that by the extra 20,000 or 30,000 people who became unemployed since the Minister took office, the true cost is quite staggering. If one takes a conventional figure of £6,000 a year, £3,000 for benefits, £500 for pay-related social insurance and all the other additional costs, for every 5,000 unemployed people the extra cost to those who are employed is in the region of £35 million a year.
A question was asked in the House of Commons last October about unemployment. The Minister concerned said that the cost to the State in cash terms alone for one unemployed person in the UK was over £6,000 per annum. Today that would be about £6,500 or £7,000. The true economic cost of unemployment, as reflected in the Social Welfare Bill, is very often hidden and should be stressed with greater concern. Earlier the Minister rightly said, that Deputies tend to come into the House, make their points and then disappear. We are all busy people. I have a deputation at 11.30 so I cannot remain to hear the Minister's speech. I am sorry I cannot be here for his reply and no discourtesy is intended. Nevertheless, I ask the Minister to take cognisance of these points in his reply.