It is fashionable to say to the world at large that we do not have real poverty in Ireland, of the kind that exists in the Third World. It is one of these extraordinary self-righteous things that people who tend to be extremely well off usually advance to the world, somehow in justification of something or other about Irish society. Nevertheless, it is fashionable to suggest that we do not have real poverty in Ireland. I will begin what I hope will be coherent comments on the Bill, on the nature of poverty and related matters by putting a couple of basic facts on the record.
The Simon Community in Cork told me recently that 12 months ago about four families a week used to come to them looking for food. Last November this had escalated to close to 20 families a day looking for food. I know the people involved: it is not a question of them being easily conned, it is a question of a basic reality. A number of teachers in primary schools have told me they have now identified why large numbers of children in their schools are listless and disinterested. It is because the children are coming to school hungry something the teachers did not notice three or four years ago but they notice it now. The sort of theorising that is thrown around, the rationalisation, the manipulation of figures that is used particularly by spokesmen of the Government and, indeed, of their predecessors, that somehow there is a safety net being maintained in the face of the recession which is preserving the living standards of the poor, are fundamentally in conflict with the facts of people's experiences. The facts are that people who are poor are becoming rapidly poorer, that a whole series of oppressions are being piled on their shoulders and that things that we would like to pretend do not exist, for example, basic hunger, are now a fact of experience for many people in Irish life. I know of one or two people who do not eat for a few days in the week in order to pay the rent for their accommodation.
It is reassuring and maybe a sign of progress to have the issue of poverty debated in the Houses of the Oireachtas. There was a long period in Irish life when talking about poverty was regarded as only one step away from subversion, Marxism and so on, that there was a certain healthiness about being poor, that it was a sign of the purity of the strain and of our detachment from earthy things and that we did not have any poverty. Of course, the reality is that two of our major parties presided over a very effective Irish solution to the problem of poverty which is that we exported our poor people to Britain and the United States. One million people emigrated in the period since the foundation of the State, who effectively relieved our increasing and burgeoning poverty problem.
Now, of course, they are at home. Notwithstanding the encouragement of prominent industrialists, businessmen and politicians, they resolutely refused to emigrate and be shifted off to the Ruhr and the other great industrial areas of Germany to share in the exploitation of the Turks, the Greeks and the other people who provided cheap labour for those countries. Because they resolutely refused to emigrate, we are beginning to experience the realities of what poverty on a wide scale does to a society. That is beginning to be manifest in particular in matters such as crime and so on.
Notwithstanding the publication of this Bill, which took two and a half years to gestate, to be considered, discussed, amended and all that goes into the process of producing a Bill, the reason for its delay escapes me and I suspect will escape anybody else who reads it. It is welcome as far as it goes, but it is hard to understand why it took two years of work to produce this small document, large sections of which are copied directly from another Act. Nevertheless, the Bill is there.
The Bill, in terms of what it proposes to do and above all in terms of the resources that it is intended to make available, is not our response to poverty. On the other hand, the increase in repression by way of the Criminal Justice Act and the extensive and apparently continuing humiliation of poor people through the labour exchanges, through cutbacks in public housing and other areas like that, are the reality of our response to poverty — the real response is a response of control, a response of suppression and a response of preservation of the established order of society.
I wish somebody somewhere in a Government Department would even begin to quantify the problem of poverty, not just to tell us in shameful, round figures that there are a million poor in this country, but to begin to tell us that that million people are not one homogeneous group but are, if you like, the army of the marginalised, all those in Irish society who for one reason or another are excluded from the mainstream. It is indeed a complex mix of people all of whom are marginalised. We can go through that army of the marginalised and identify some of the problem areas and put them yet again on the record of Irish society through the record of Seanad Éireann.
The average pension payment in 1979 amounted to less than a quarter of average industrial earnings. That was a very marginal, almost insignificant, increase on the ratio between pensions and industrial earnings five or six years before. Effectively, we are making no progress and, indeed, there are a considerable number of campaigns to suggest that there are good, necessary, hard-nosed — whatever are all the appropriate epithets and adjectives which justify the callous nature of many public policies today — arguments that we must maintain these dreadful relativities.
Pensioners are in some way, to use a phrase that could be misused, the acceptable form of poverty. It is easy and acceptable politically to talk about our old people as long as you do not suggest that we should re-use resources, because if you suggest we should re-use resources, you must talk about what other deprived group you are taking the resources from. There is this enormous willingness in society to campaign vigorously for redistribution, but the form of redistribution that we are campaigning for is redistribution within and between different groups who comprise our one million poor, not redistribution from those who have to those who have not, but redistribution from one group who have not to other groups who have not. It is particularly fashionable among bankers, employers and industrialists when they advocate means tests and when they talk about confining social services to those who really need them, a category which apparently is easier for a banker to identify than anybody actually working with poor people. Nevertheless, even in the relative hierarchy of fashionable kinds of poor, the one which is least discussed, the one people tend to qualify with all sorts of hedging of bets, is the category of the unemployed. Neither the party which usually occupy the benches in front of me, nor the major party opposite are really prepared to accept that the unemployed are poor. They are either a temporary phenomenon, they are in need of incentives or they are in need of campaigns in terms of abuses or something.
The first and most fundamental characteristic of unemployment is poverty. If we are to talk about dealing with poverty we cannot talk about it in terms of the fashionable to some extent, or the socially acceptable marginalised groups, but we must talk about it in terms rather of the groups which are central to our society today and which, given the pessimism of most Irish politicians, are going to be central to Irish society for the indefinite future. Among those groups loom largest the ranks of the unemployed.
Put quite simply there is no point in dealing with poverty in Irish society. There is no point in expounding enormous amounts of rhetorical good-will if the levels of unemployment assistance and unemployment benefit remain as they are, pathetically inadequate to support an individual and pathetically inadequate to support a family. All the research, all the campaigning and all the self-help groups in the world will not change the basic fact that that income is inadequate, that poverty prevails in the ranks of the unemployed and will continue to prevail. All the psychological studies and the damage done by unemployment are meaningless if we do nothing about the income of the unemployed. Our society is not just characterised by an indifference to the plight of the unemployed, it is characterised by a positive hostility to the unemployed, a lack of sympathy to their needs and to their feelings and, most of all, by the apparent eternal "hype" about abuses of the social welfare system, abuses which are to be responded to, I understand, in the Social Welfare Bill which we will get tomorrow, in terms of increased penalties, increased vigilance, increased numbers and almost a suggestion of a new category of vigilantes to deal with these nasty people who are defrauding the State.
Irrespective of the arguments of whether there is a marginal problem of abuse — the figure usually quoted represents about .1 of 1 per cent of the total social welfare expenditure — the atmosphere that is created by people who have power, influence, money and services available to them, is characterised by hostility to and denigration of the unemployed. Undermining the dignity of the unemployed is bad enough, but when Governments and Ministers respond to that with more penalties, more investigations and more downright cruelty to the unemployed, then one has to say that there is not just an indifference to the unemployed, there is a downright hostility towards them. Why, I do not know, and what it is based on, I do not know. Of course, the 250,000 people who are unemployed are not all saints, but they are, before everything else, victims of our inability to order our affairs. It can be truthfully said that most of those who criticise unemployment abuse, who query the alleged disincentive value of unemployment benefit and unemployment assistance, who suggest more stringent controls over access to unemployment benefit — many in the ranks of Fine Gael suggest that the unemployed should be conscripted into the Army, as a Fine Gael MEP has said on at least two occasions — have one thing in common, they have never seen the inside of a labour exchange. They have never seen the inside of a social welfare office. They never had to suffer the humiliation of signing on, the moral degradation of the long queues, the deliberately humiliating atmosphere of the extraordinary procedure of having to sign a receipt for money before it is placed in your hand and, above all the humiliation of being compelled to be available for work when work is no longer available. In that context the Minister for Health and Social Welfare sent a letter which is a classic of its kind in terms of indifference. Two of our young footballers had the tremendous honour of competing for Ireland in the Soviet Union. They were enormously successful and were away from home for a fortnight. They came back, and discovered they had lost their entitlement to unemployment assistance because they were not available for work. Together with a number of other people I raised the matter with the Minister, and his concluding remarks were that these people were not available for work and that perhaps the Football Association of Ireland would keep that in mind in future when they are selecting people to play football outside the country. This seemed to suggest that if these young people were not employed the football association should not pick them because if they are unemployed we cannot support them.
That, more than anything else, characterises the attitude to the unemployed and this nonsensical provision about availability for work in a society where everybody, even those who claim to have the most optimistic Ronald Reaganite views of the future of the free enterprise system, accept that there will not be work for everybody in the future. If we insist on oppressing the unemployed by insisting on a qualification of availability for work to justify their getting the pittance we give them, then we are not supporting the unemployed. We are not assisting the unemployed. We are consistently, methodically and systematically humiliating them. It seems extraordinary that when people talk at length about poverty and social welfare they talk about widows and old people, but they leave the unemployed to, at best, a throwaway remark at the end of their speeches. I have said often that it is time we stopped talking about unemployment as if it were some abstract economic statistic and started talking about the humiliation of the unemployed. One of the qualities that is attributed to the unemployed is the apparent unwillingness to work. It appears that there is a sustained view within the Establishment that if you raise unemployment assistance or unemployment benefit too high it becomes a disincentive to work. It is fascinating that those who talk about these disincentives would spend as much on a meal as a single person on unemployment assistance has to live on for a week. Nevertheless, those same people can pronounce on the disincentive nature of unemployment assistance. One of the consequences of that in recent years has been a policy of successive Governments tying what they call our short term social welfare rates more to the rate of wage increases than to the rate of inflation. The truth is that if anything is to be done about the plight of the unemployed there is only one immediate remedy available and that is a substantial, real and fundamental raising of the rates of payment to the unemployed. All the talk, all the concern, all the hands on hearts and all the political posturing is meaningless if we leave unemployed people as they are. All the talk about alienation, psychological damage, a sense of worthlessness and pointlessness is a load of meaningless claptrap unless people identify that what the unemployed need now, immediately, is an income on which they can live in dignity.
Unemployment leads to crime, to alcoholism, to drug abuse and probably to psychiatric illness. Our response to the problem of unemployment is to humiliate these people even further. It is a shame that we not only cannot provide employment for these people but we assist in providing a series of humiliations through which they must pass on the road to the pittance we offer them as unemployment assistance.
There are other large areas of marginalisation in Irish society. Our single parents in terms of income and housing provisions are severely discriminated against. Of our 40,000 old people living alone, 60 per cent of them do not have hot water, 30 per cent have no water, and 10 per cent have no electricity. So much for statistics. This is one of the interesting queries I would like to put to the Minister: is he really sure that we need yet more and more research on poverty? What has been generated in the last ten years is not a solution to the problem of poverty but an enormous volume of research on poverty and its nature. If we could talk about research which is related to action to solve a problem it would be fine, but we have a volume of statistics which defy description. I could not even begin to go through the volumes of books on the problem of poverty that even a layman like myself has access to.
Our 13,000 travellers, 50 per cent of them children, were promised legislation 12 months ago, not quite as long as the homeless have been promised legislation and not nearly as long as our children have been promised legislation. But, all promised legislation of a serious kind has one thing in common, that is, the promise has been broken. Apart from the travelling people's problems of income and housing, they now have to suffer being the scapegoats for every outburst of serious crime anywhere in Ireland. A traveller is anybody who is travelling and, therefore, if the person suspected of having committed a crime has moved away, one can always say he was a traveller, even though one was not attacking the travelling community. It is particularly sad to see Members of this House, as one particular individual has done, develop a prejudice against the travelling community in this city.
On the Tallaght by-pass in 1981 there were 80 caravans and from those 80 caravans there were more than 40 children in hospital at one time. We let those people wait and the Government make and break their promises. It would not be fair for me to continue talking about the problems of the homeless, but, nevertheless the following Ministers, Deputy Ruairí Quinn, Deputy Fergus O'Brien, Deputy Liam Kavanagh, and Deputy Séamus Pattison, have all made promises about dealing with the problem of the homeless. The Minister of State responsible for Youth Affairs in a blunt expression said he was going to meet the problem head on. Wherever he met the problem head on, I have not seen the consequences of it yet. Finally, the Taoiseach made two speeches about home-lessness in the last six months and he promised to do something about the problem. The one common characteristic of all those promises is that they have all been broken, and the problem of the homeless remains. I would like to quote from a survey carried out by the National Campaign for the Homeless on Ireland's young homeless. They determined that there were approximately 800 young homeless people in this country. Among the other things they discovered was that a large number of the agencies who had met homeless young people concluded that those homeless young people were sleeping rough before they came into contact with the agencies. I wonder how much do we need to know about any problem related to poverty, causing poverty, or manifesting poverty, before we do something about it. It took us two and a half years to get this Bill and apparently it is going to take us until 1987 to get the legislation on the homeless. I wonder how long it is going to take us to get the legislation on travellers and what it will be like when it comes.
Apart from our homeless we have our long stay psychiatric patients. Whatever their present plight, I fear for their future because the fashion of community psychiatric care is now threatening to destabilise their lives. They are allegedly going to be allowed to return to the community to the tender mercies of our community care services. Anybody who has had any experience of the way our community care services operate would be anything but enthusiastic about this move. Anybody who saw a recent British television programme on community care for psychiatric patients and the way they all inevitably gravitated into hostels, dosshouses, cheap lodgings and positions where they were not cared for or fed, will have a profound suspicion of what really is involved in community psychiatric care.
Real community psychiatric care will inevitably be more expensive than hospitalisation. I see officialdom and politicians latching on to the concept of community psychiatry with such overwhelming enthusiasm I have a suspicion that the motivation may be as much financial as it is compassion or therapeutic. I want to warn this House and families and relatives of people in long stay psychiatric hospitals to be extremely vigilant because what is described as community psychiatric care may well mean you doing a job instead of the State doing it, and doing a job that you are incapable and unable to do so that the State can save money. We have 14,000 long stay psychiatric patients. They are liable to be discharged from hospitals into what will appear on the surface to be very caring and compassionate community psychiatric caring agencies. The evidence is that no resources, no back-up, no home help and none of the necessary range of services that will be needed to achieve what is obviously an admirable objective, will be available. What we will have is another problem discharged into marginalisation and into the hostels and dosshouses where people are more or less permanently invisible.
One thing I have learned over the last ten years is that whether we have an area which is called community care under our health boards, there is hardly any area where community care actually exists. Let me give an example of community care in an area related to psychiatry. I know a group of 21 parents in Cork who have children who are profoundly and severely mentally handicapped. These brave people decided for the best reasons that they would not institutionalise their children, that they would keep them at home. This decision was based on concern and love for their children and not on any other reason. They discover that because they do not institutionalise their children there is no provision for them. They want training for their children on a day care basis, but that cannot be provided. They want travel facilities for their children on a day care basis, but that cannot be provided. If one can draw any conclusions from that it is that that is an interesting microcosm of the future of community care. If their children were not handicapped they could get travel services to school, but because they are profoundly handicapped no such travel services is available. If these children were in permanent residential care it would cost the State between £10,000 and £20,000 a year to maintain them, but out of these institutions it costs the State very little. Nevertheless, the inability, the inflexibility, or the downright pigheadedness of the statutory agencies leaves these parents profoundly on their own. Therefore, if our long stay psychiatric patients are to be cared for, then they must be cared for either by upgrading the currently existing institutions, by replacing them with new institutions, or by community care services which are properly funded, properly monitored and properly re-organised as needs change and develop.
It is often omitted in discussions like this that we have an extensive problem of rural poverty. In 1979 there were 40,000 farm families with an income of less than £2,000 a year. It is one of the regrettable characteristics of Irish life that one of the real blows against poverty, by which I identify the smallholders' assistance, is now being pared back and assessed in ways which seem to be adding to the humiliation of yet another marginalised group. The anger that many Members of this House showed at the humiliating way smallholders were assessed for smallholders' assistance was admirable. I only regret that the continuing and similar humiliation of the urban unemployed does not seem to provoke anything like the same sense of rage and outrage.
Another area which is very fashionable in Ireland today, fashionable in the sense that it seems to be the recipe for our future economic salvation, is those who are poorly paid and, if we are to believe the economic gurus, these are the people who should be the salvation of the country. From what I can see they are the salvation of a series of vested interests. People working in the hairdressing profession, in many areas of catering and, judging from consistent reports, many of the employees of the legal profession, seem to be paid quite astonishingly small sums of money for their week's work.
We come back to this extraordinary proposal that one of the Government parties seem to be committed to, that is, to link unemployment assistance to earnings. That seems to be no more than a conspiracy to preserve low pay and to copperfasten inequality. What have we to say about an education service where almost 10 per cent of our children leave school before they are 15 years old, and 15 per cent leave at 15? This means that close to one in four of our children leave school at or before the minimum age.
The poor have inadequate income and inadequate services in the areas of health, education and the environment. Yet, sadly, they seem to tolerate it. They tolerate the way they are treated; they tolerate their problems being put on the long finger, and they tolerate the indifference that is shown to them. How do we as a society tolerate the absence of children's legislation and the appalling ignorance about the absence of children's legislation when the Minister of State can say the same thing as his senior Minister said 12 months ago and get headlines again, can announce the same thing three years in a row in virtually the same wording and get headlines on each successive occasion? It astonishes me that we, as a society, care so little for our children that the standstill sort of announcements that successive Ministers and junior Ministers from the Department of Health have made about children's legislation, are still apparently regarded as news by the media. We have done nothing about our children; we are doing nothing about our children, and, judging by the passing reference to juvenile justice in the national plan, we do not propose to do anything about that area for a long time.
Why do our poor people tolerate all this? Why do our old people, our unemployed, in particular our young unemployed, tolerate this? It is because there is one characteristic common to all our poor people, and that is powerlessness because poverty is no accident. People are poor because they are powerless, or perhaps they are powerless because they are poor. It is really a chicken and egg situation. It is no accident, for instance, that the voting participation levels in poor areas of cities is much lower than anywhere else. I wonder if the two major parties would enthusiastically support the idea of making voting compulsory. This might upset delicate balances in a large number of urban constituencies.
Many urbanised poor people see the forces of law and order not as a support but as an agent of oppression. It is also a fact that most poor people, if they have the misfortune to end up in court, where people are supposed to be equal before the law, find the court procedures anything but equal from their viewpoint. The commonality of interests that exists in court procedures between the Garda, the legal profession and the judiciary, is further evidence of the powerlessness of poor people. Our prison population is comprised largely of poor people. Irrespective of who commits the crimes in society, those who end up in prison are poor, they are people without employment opportunities, people without educational background, people who cannot read, and a substantial minority who cannot do basic addition and subtraction. The law is not equal and citizens are not equal before the law.
The oppression of poor people is not confined to the State or to the agents of the State in the areas of law enforcement. We deliver, organise and run social services as an instrument of oppression and, indeed, in many cases an instrument of control. I have already instanced the quality of labour exchanges — if I can use the word "quality" in the context of labour exchanges. There is an extraordinary rigmarole involved in getting a medical card. If any of those who pronounce most about the need for means tests had ever to go through the rigmarole of getting medical cards, of qualifying for all the so-called benefits that are available, the system would collapse rapidly under the volume of protests, as was evidenced in the case of small farmers assistance. When they were subjected to the humiliations that are commonplace in urban areas the system was rapidly improved and humanised.
A characteristic example of the humiliation of the poor is in the social welfare appeals system. There is no specific evidence presented to a person who is appealing against disqualification. There is no ability to cross-examine those who make the allegations against them and there is no confrontation with their accusers in the process of appealing against disqualification. The legal aid board are not allowed to take an interest in social welfare law and social welfare cases. If ever I saw society carefully preserving itself from the threat that people might feel they were equal before the law, that administrative decision is a case in point, even though the Coolock Law Centre identifies social welfare appeals as one of the major areas of legal concern for poor people.
If we are to remedy poverty we must first identify its causes. Somewhere in this Bill there is a reference to do precisely that, and as far as it goes it is worthwhile. Poverty is not an accident. It is one of the fashionable middle-class liberal virtues to talk about poverty as if the poor are the people we happened to forget, that somehow we did not really notice that people were poor for the last 20 years, but now that we know there are poor people in society we are going to do something about it. Poverty is not an accident. It is a direct consequence of the way we order society. It is a reflection of the values of society and in particular, it is a reflection of the emphasis on competition as a basic value in society. Competition is used in education and as a mark of progress in economic matters. We have a society which is based on competition, and in competition there are winners and losers. In order to identify the winners, we enshrine a level of affluence and consumption as a mark of success. If there are winners then there must be losers, because people's success cannot be measured in material terms. If there is not a benchmark against which to measure success, it is necessary to have poor people in order that the success of those who are successful in our ruthless, competitive society can be measured. Poverty is not an accident. It is a necessary consequence of the values that we have as a society. The poor are necessary to reassure the powerful that they are successful.
There are a lot of words used to describe the poor. Words like "under privileged, deprived and socially disadvantaged" should be abandoned because they imply that the whole thing was an accident, an unfortunate error. The poor are not deprived, they are not underprivileged, they are not socially disadvantaged. They are oppressed. They are not some group who happen to be there by accident. They are a consequence of the values on which Irish society chooses to operate. They are necessary for society to sustain itself and to sustain the levels of activity in society. We build into our society an assumption about how people work and what causes society to operate efficiently.
Poverty is cyclical. Children are born into poor families. Because they are poor their housing is poor. Because their housing is poor, their health is poor and because they are poor the health services they get are poor.
The reports of the Medical Social Research Board clearly demonstrate that the children of the poor or the oppressed, have poorer health. There are higher levels of infant mortality among poor people. It all amounts to a cycle, because they are poor, and malnourished they leave school early. The cycle continues. In this cycle of poverty it would appear that the only intervention we as a society can make is in the prescription of tranquillisers in large volume to preserve the sanity of those who have to function within that society.
I remember the remarks of a woman from the inner city of Dublin who was being prescribed tranquillisers in large quantities. When she discovered the price of the tranquillisers she said that if she was given the cash equivalent of the tranquillisers she would not need them at all because she would have an income sufficient to support her family. It appears that the one thing we can do without qualification and without limit is prescribe pills, drugs and medicines to people to preserve their placidity because I suspect that without tranquillisers people would not tolerate what we impose on them.
If poverty is not an accident then we must recognise that there are those in our society who have a vested interest in the preservation of poverty. Five years ago, it would not have been fashionable to say that. The speeches of those who lecture about competitiveness and who simplify competitiveness down to income and wages make one begin to realise that what they are really talking about is a low income economy. If the income from work is to be kept low then the consequence of that is that the income for people who are not at work, whether they are pensioners or unemployed people must be kept even lower. Therefore, those who lecture us about competitiveness and the competitiveness myth and particularly the wage correlation with the competitiveness myth are effectively lecturing us on the need to preserve poverty in Irish society. People are needed to do poorly-paid jobs. People are needed to preserve poorly-paid employment particularly in large areas of the tourist industry where we are told that high wage rates are driving up prices and frightening off tourists. Apparently we must have people who are prepared to work at wage levels which enable us to charge what are deemed to be attractive rates.
Many people have a vested interest in poverty. There is nothing unusual in that. The history of society for the last 200 years is a history of conflict between the interests of those who control wealth and capital and those who do not. It is one of the cycles of history that at present those who control wealth and capital are dominant in terms of influence and in terms of the thinking of society. To deal with poverty fundamentally we must deal with the structure of society, with the system of economic and social values in which society chooses to operate and the whole social order.
When the Taoiseach spoke to a poverty conference in Kilkenny in 1981 he said that if we were to eliminate poverty we would have to "subvert" the social order at the time. It was probably the only time the Taoiseach committed himself to subversion on a grand scale but it was a most appropriate commitment and one that I hope he has not forgotten entirely. Perhaps the Minister will remind him of it.
Notwithstanding that poverty will never be dealt with fundamentally within the present structure of society, there is a great deal that could be done if there were a political will to do it. We could do it by law in the area of the organisation of the social welfare system. We could do it by law in the area of accountability, in the areas of participation and of access to information about people's treatment and in a number of other areas. We could do it by allocation of resources into welfare, into housing and education. We could do it by looking at the whole appalling mess which is our supplementary welfare system, a system which is characterised by unwritten laws by which people must operate, by circulars which are not public knowledge, by criteria of assessing means which are not public knowledge and by rules which seem to vary with the resources available and from area to area. A community welfare officer for instance, to my knowledge, in the North Eastern Health Board determined that a person is entitled to no more than £15 a week if he has no other means and somebody in another area will give another person £29 a week. This miasma or network of discrimination could be dealt with by legislation and by political will.
Let us get away from this nonsense that we cannot afford it. We are not, contrary to a widely-held view, the most heavily taxed country in western Europe. There are large areas of exemption from taxation in Ireland. I wonder how many people realise that you have to make more than £15,000 a year on capital gains before you pay any capital gains tax. People are told that their total personal income tax allowances is a fraction of that and yet if you are in the capital gains and capital appreciation business you can make £15,000 in any given year before being liable for capital gains tax. How many people realise that, when they think we are overburdened? Foreign manufacturing industry made profits of £1,500 million last year in Ireland and did not pay one penny tax on that. Do we realise that people on high rates of income tax are heavily subsidised in their house purchase. There is a long list of things. I will quote from the Economic and Social Research Institute about the real nature of our taxation system.
A report from ESRI paper No. 109 published in 1981, states:
As taxation on capital and inherited wealth drifted towards the inconsequential, an awareness of social class would have alerted policy-makers to the possibility that Ireland may enter the twenty-first century with an upper middle class so privileged and so securely entrenched as to harken back to its nineteenth century predecessors.
If I said that, I would be accused of Marxist rhetoric. It was not I; it was a respected social and economic research body which said that, that we are enforcing an extraordinary and uneven class distribution of wealth and power in the structure of Irish taxation. To suggest that we have reached a determinable objective ceiling in terms of the resources available to deal with poverty is a nonsense. The acceptable levels of taxation are not an objective number that can be independently determined; they are a matter of political acceptability and what is politically acceptable depends on what politicians and society choose to accept. If we create a hysteria about levels of taxation and leave large areas without taxation, it is not, I suspect, because of objective concern for the poor overburdened PAYE sector but because of the interests of that minority in Irish society who control wealth, capital and power, whose interests are threatened by an extension of taxation. The extension of taxation would invade the area of the untouched, the overprivileged that the Economic and Social Research Institute identified. That could be done within the structure of Irish society as it is now constituted.
In the context of the reality of poverty the Bill is no more than one small step along the way. It is very well-intentioned and the objectives it sets for the Combat Poverty Agency are welcome. But why do we produce a Combat Poverty Agency and allocate it a pathetic sum of less than £1 million to combat poverty in Ireland? I want to remind the House — and it is not popular to do so because it is probably one of the more popular liberal achievements — that we spent £20 million in the last few years to renovate a property whose precise function we have not yet identified, that is, the Royal Hospital in Kilmainham. That may have been money well spent but I have my reservations about it. It is a bit much to tell Irish society that we have no money for anything: that we have no money for a dozen good causes if we do have money to do that, if we have money to do something so ill-defined, so unplanned and unprepared. At the bottom line one has to ask why is it that we are allocating such little resources to an agency to deal with such a huge problem. One has to conclude that fear is part of the motivation. If you turn over the stone in Irish society and reveal all the problems, all the oppression, all the injustice and suggest to those who are oppressed and victims of injustice that they can actually do something about it, then the consequences for Irish society would be extremely unpredictable and indeed would be unpalatable for many who have a vested interest in the status quo. Therefore, it seems that unless this Bill and the agency set up are given resources of about ten, 15 or 20 times greater than those proposed — in other words, roughly the same amount of money that is spent on the FAC every year — we cannot begin to challenge poverty in Irish society. But then a challenge to poverty in Irish society is a challenge to the structure of Irish society, to the inequalities and injustices of Irish society and fundamentally to the control of wealth and power in Irish society and we will have to presume that it will not be done.
