Before the debate was adjourned I commented on the fact that little or nothing was done with regard to either research into or examination of the extent of poverty in Ireland until the Kilkenny conference on poverty in 1981 from which emerged the fact that the astonishing figure of a quarter of a million of the population were poor. While certain pilot programmes regarding poverty were set up here and research was done into the subject, the same activity was being undertaken at European level and member countries received funding towards this end. A great deal was done in this area in both the EC programmes and the Irish programmes in pilot schemes between 1976 and the end of 1980.
I will be brief on this subject today because this is merely welcoming the Bill and establishing its principle and I welcome it because at that stage the national committee recommended the establishment of such an agency as this Bill is introducing. If we sensed a lack of urgency, of seriousness, or that the situation was improving during those years, the EC Commission's final report on the poverty programme showed that Ireland had the highest level of poverty within the EC as it was then constituted; 23.1 per cent of households in Ireland were below the poverty line. The report showed also that the national net income in Ireland then was only 64.5 per cent of the EC average. That made the situation even worse. Relatively the poor in our country were even poorer because of our lower national income average. With the difficult times we were coming through the poor were even poorer because of the lower national income and with the high levels of unemployment. We are setting up the agency and the principles and the functions outlined are to be welcomed. I hope that not alone will those principles and functions be implemented but that progress will also be made.
I started off by saying that part of the problem was lack of knowledge and appreciation of poverty. Even more important is the alleviation and removal of it. In the fifties and sixties when we had strong economic programmes we did not align them with social planning. No economic programme should ever be introduced without the social implications being spelled out alongside it. If that were a statutory requirement for Government I could not put it strongly enough. The social victims of some of our economic planning are examples of what I am talking about. The agency should advise and make recommendations to the Minister on all aspects of economic and social planning in relation to poverty. They should also initiate measures aimed at overcoming poverty and evaluate such measures.
Some speakers who have already contributed questioned whether or not we need any more research. One of the principal functions of the agency will be to examine the nature, causes and extent of poverty. For that purpose the promotion and interpretation of research is needed. Some speakers feel that enough research has been done as to the extent of poverty. That may be the case but there has not been enough research with regard to effectively removing poverty. I was reminded of that very forcibly ten years after the first Kilkenny conference on poverty in 1971. A second one was held in 1981. Unfortunately not alone was there not much progress made with regard to the removal of poverty during that ten year period, but we were biting into a very hard and long recession. Some attitudes towards unemployment had not only become less enlightened but had actually hardened. One good thing that came from the fact that people were working actively within the areas of poverty was the knowledge that perhaps research was necessary to look at the various systems for relieving poverty. Most systems only relieve poverty and do not remove it. Within those areas and within the budget which we can afford, there should be a far more effective use of it.
Many Members spoke about the different levels of social welfare. I do not intend to take up the time of the House on this because we also have a Social Welfare Bill in which it will be addressed. A report is eagerly awaited from the Commission on Social Welfare. One could go through every category within the social welfare system and see that it is not alone not contributing towards the removal of poverty but it is also adding to the humiliation and lack of self-esteem which people who are caught within the social welfare system have to suffer.
One point which I hope we will discuss in a more constructive way when the commission submit their report is that, because of the patchwork assembling of it decade after decade, and trying to cope with vulnerable sections that emerged throughout the seventies, we have no coherent programme. The report from the National Economic and Social Council of January 1985 entitled Economic and Social Policy Assessment highlighted what I am talking about. It states:
Poverty traps essentially result from the lack of co-ordination of the ways in which benefits are withdrawn and taxes are imposed.
The whole trust of that report is that not alone do we have to look at the social welfare system but also at the whole tax system. One is totally interlocked with the other.
A term which was developed in Britain in the early seventies was that people were caught in the poverty trap. That term has become so familiar to us now that we feel it has been with us much longer. Not alone did the patchwork building-up of the social welfare system and the lack of reform within the tax system lead to poverty, but it also led to a lack of co-ordination. Much of this comes about because we have spread it around through several Departments and agencies to the extent that there is sometimes duplication. The result is that the very people who need help do not get it. I hope the commission will look into this area.
Another term coined since the early seventies is the unemployment trap. By getting into a work situation families lose heavily. People may use one benefit from the social welfare system as a marker for so many other benefits. The one that comes to mind is the medical card. We should look at the area of giving eligibility benefits through the medical card. It is almost seen as a passport to many other areas of support systems such as free school transport. It is used almost as a credit card. The means test is so stringent that nobody will rip it off. Within this poverty trap there is a valley in which thousands of people are caught and in which there is a total cut-off. Many things are eligible within a very narrow margin in the social welfare system. Fear and insecurity must be the most terrible experiences for people in the social welfare system. Without co-ordination we are not even beginning to approach the problem. Research and models from other countries must be used in this regard.
We employ arbitrary methods which do not apply to the real circumstances in which people find themselves. We have a very high dependency level of very young and elderly in our population and, instead of trying to make these a priority, we still marginalise them, particularly the elderly. There must be more compassion and humanity shown in these cases. If one has an non-contributory pension one is eligible for certain items such as free telephone rental, a certain amount of free electricity and perhaps free fuel. These are basic lifelines for older people — the difference between life and death.
I would mention the case of a widow of a bank manager or some other person who died young and whose pension was not all that high but seemed at the time to have been a pretty good and secure pension to live on. Inflation, thankfully, has come down, but, with the huge change in prices, we are not talking about the same economic background as, for example, in the sixties. I know of people living alone for whom a telephone is a necessity because they may be at risk from a health point of view. The only way in which they have the security of getting help is by telephone. The telephone rental is prohibitive for people on a low income. The agency must see that we use our whole economic strength as effectively as possible based on need, not on arbitrary categories which place people inside or outside eligibility, regardless of their real day-to-day situation. We must use a much broader and more humane method than this. I hope that the research facilities available to the agency will concentrate on that whole area from the beginning.
It is not that we are not spending money. We spend a large part of our GNP on social welfare, per capita even higher than in the UK, which is considered the ultimate welfare state. We have to examine how effectively we direct that money to those who need it most and how much is spent on duplication in needless bureaucracy and overcategorisation. I shall give a practical example of how money can be more effectively used and saved. At the 1981 Conference on Poverty, one of my most lasting memories was of a report given by Nóirín Kearney. Many people in this House will know that she has been involved for many years in the whole area of research into and statistics of poverty. She decided for that conference to discard the practice of giving cold statistics, which we hear and forget, and instead gave a practical example of how in combating poverty we were not using what was available to us as effectively and as humanely as we should.
She quoted the case of a family caught in the poverty trap. The children, because of lack of nutrition, were far more open to all kinds of disease. Depending on which disease they caught, or which doctor they attended, they were sent to different hospitals within the city. The mother had to take them to these different hospitals at great cost in time and expense. It was also discovered that a file on the child's health was never sent from one hospital to another, so a new file had to be set up in each hospital, without any continuity in the record of the health history of the child. A great number of drugs, including antibiotics, had to be used consistently by the family because malnutrition had made that the only way of coping with keeping the children in good health. This was costly at every level.
The mother was under severe pressure and was kept going on a day-to-day basis by drugs and sedation. When Nóirín Kearney added up the cost to the State and to that family, she discovered that this was not the most central, effective and humane way of dealing with this problem. It was costing everybody — certainly the family — more expense than if they had been given enough of a basic income to buy good food, keep themselves warm and protect themselves from the costly health hazards that they were running into. That is what this agency must be about.
I could not talk on a Combat Poverty Bill without mentioning the ritual humiliation and guilt that we build up in people who are forced on to the social welfare system. These must be removed, or we cannot live with ourselves as a society. As Senator Michael Higgins has already said, we cannot base our welfare system or our whole society on compassion or aid. We must build them on justice. Until this agency comes into being and the social welfare system has been reformed, we cannot begin to see the measures that we would all hope to see implemented in cases that we as public representatives come across daily.
I am glad that section 5 states that the agency will have the duty of submitting periodic strategic plans for the Minister's approval and also that a report of such reviews will be laid before each House of the Oireachtas. We must all take collective responsibility as legislators and as Members of the two Houses which pass the budget for each year. We must be in the vanguard in trying to bring about changes in our society.
It has often been repeated that we cannot talk about removing from our society poverty, inequality and discrimination, low esteem and snobbery, privilege and perks unless we fundamentally want to change society. That will be painful and difficult for those who have the perks and privileges at the moment. However, if we have any sense of common justice, we must do that. Every family unit and every person must feel that they have a right to a basic income, regardless of what work ethic is being exercised. When we talk about work we must acknowledge that it is very unequal with regard to its reward in status and in income.
Even the words "salary" and "wages" have connotations of skilled and unskilled, of status and lack of status. I remember getting statistics about how Sweden had managed to achieve the type of democracy, equality and lack of discrimination of which they could be proud. In passing, I wish to record my sadness and shock at the assassination of an architect of social democracy, Olaf Palme. Sweden brought about the social planning which was needed by ensuring that all work was regarded as it met the needs of the community. This meant that somebody who collected rubbish was considered to be performing a service which was at least as important, and much more valuable, than that provided by an engineer building a bridge. This meant that that person was rewarded in status and in salary. They also ensured that nobody's wages were more than two or three times that of another's. It is some years since I got those statistics but at that time in Ireland the gap between the top salary and the lowest wage was 16 times. Can we live in a country which designates a job as being 16 times more important and more highly rewarded than others? When we look at some of these low paid jobs we see that they are among the most demanding, repetitive, physically exhausting and valuable to the community. That is the type of fact which I should like to see the agency and the legislators taking into account. We should discard these built-in inequalities in our society.
We know from history that as a nation we had little or nothing. We were denied an education and the right to possess land. We were even denied the right to improve our houses. One would think, with that experience of deprivation, discrimination and inequality, that when we set up a State we would have ensured that we did not make the same mistakes and that we would not build in certain privileges which would once again result in deprivation, discrimination and inequality. It is a matter of sadness to me that we have allowed 60 years of that type of inequality to continue and that, in a Christian sense, we can even seek to justify it.
A quarter of our population are poor and have no control over their lives because they are in the social welfare net. Now with all the knowledge we have acquired from painful experience — lack of jobs, a change in employment and security — we should use all this information positively, not selfishly, and we should ensure that we do not hurt once again the victims of the last decade.
The pilot schemes and the poverty conferences on which this Bill is based have shown that we have poor, that we have poverty traps, and that the real victims continue to be women and children. I will not delay the House further by going into this in more detail, but the agency must concentrate on this area and, for the first time, set up structures to ensure that this position will not continue.
