What I said yesterday is that there is a mythology abroad that somehow what is being done in this country is inevitable and there is a particular offensive mythology abroad which suggests that if we did not have all those nasty, corrupt, self-interested, self-serving politicians, what is being done now would have been done a long time ago because it is so obviously correct. The strategy that is being adopted, which is represented by severe, highly selective and highly discriminatory cutbacks in public services is not inevitable. It is not the only way, and it most manifestly is not the best way. There is a fundamental doubt as to whether it can even achieve the objectives it is supposed to achieve.
I am not persuaded that continuous and successive cutbacks in public expenditure will ever actually achieve the objective of balancing the books of the Government. I am not persuaded that reducing public expenditure, which apparently will now result in a decline in gross national product and an inevitable decline in disposable income and in tax returns, will ever actually balance the books because I think it will cause a disproportionate depression in economic activity which will result in a decline in revenue to the State and an increase in unemployment which will have the direct opposite effect of what is intended.
I have frequently asked people — people in industry, commerce, business and economists — to give me an example of a country which has taken the road that they are advocating at the state we are at and under the conditions we have and which has succeeded in achieving anything. We have had these prescriptions tried, these prescriptions of dealing with economic crisis by severe cutbacks in public expenditure, all over South America, prescribed by the International Monetary Fund and by various other agencies. In no country have they succeeded in bringing anything other than misery, deprivation and injustice. They have not produced economic growth. They have not produced economic advantages to the great majority of the population. There is no evidence that what these produce is a short-term painful shock followed by a return to growth. It has not been demonstrated. It is a theory of an increasingly vocal lobby of economists which has very little factual evidence to sustain it.
I do think it needs to be said and said again that if economics is a science — which I doubt — then it must operate according to the rules of science. The first one is that the theory is only as good as the experimental evidence. However fine, pleasant, simplistic or appealing the theory, it is no good unless there is evidence to sustain it. I repeat what I have said over and over again, instead of presuming that because you say things over and over again that it becomes true, would those who advocate the line being taken by our Government please tell the Irish people and us where it has worked. For example, in 1981 Sweden had a budget deficit considerably in excess of ours as a percentage of gross national product. They have now almost eliminated it and they did not do it by closing hospitals and cutting back on fundamental services. They did it in an entirely different way. They did it without extensive human misery, without increasing the numbers of people who are unemployed, without causing a collapse in their productive sector, without causing massive emigration. It is impossible to find any serious study by an Irish economist on the achievements of many of the smaller nations of Europe. They have this fixation with looking West towards the United States which is a singularly unsuitable model or else looking to the Far East to a totally different culture. There is an utter unwillingness to look at comparable models, countries of a comparable state to ourselves — like Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Austria and indeed Switzerland — and not to copy them but to see what we can learn from them.
I regret very much that there is now appearing an underlying strategy in these cutbacks which seems to me to be close to being a calculated attack on the poor and it is as much a reflection on the people who interview them as it is on the Government that when the Taoiseach was interviewed recently, he was able to dismiss an allegation that the cutbacks were bearing too heavily on the poor, simply by saying no they were not. Because neither the radio journalists nor television journalists who interviewed them seemed to have any information. I do think that instead of going on and dealing with a whole lot of issues I would like to confine the remainder of what I had to say to detailing — and I can do it without notes because it is so clear — the scale of the assault on poor people in our society by the present Government. The first thing that needs to be said is that there is no doubt that the real levels of welfare payments have been maintained. There is no doubt about that.
If we were to go on that alone then the alleged protection of the poor would appear superficially to have been sustained. The truth is of course that there is far more deprivation than income; it is a fundamental.
The first thing to be said is that everybody on welfare is unacceptably poor because of the unacceptably low levels of welfare. The second thing that needs to be said is that if at the same time as we do no more than maintain the real value of welfare, we make health services more inaccessible and increase waiting lists for health services. The same applies to education if we begin to chip away at free education, as is being done and has been done by successive Governments in recent years, so that little demands are made here and there on the fixed income of the poor for extra contributions for school heating, for the provision of things as minor as toilet paper. In the case of the school where my daughter attends, pupils have been asked to bring in plastic bags because there is a leak in the roof and the seats are getting wet. They need something to sit on so that they do not catch pneumonia. The list is endless of minor expenditures and minor costs schools can no longer meet.
If I am asked to contribute a voluntary contribution of 50p a week, of course I can afford it but if I was on £35 a week or £50 a week then 50p unbudgetted, unplanned, that I now have to meet means a litre of milk gone from the family table. They are the choices people are being forced to make. Even more fundamental than the assault on the costs which poor people have to sustain, the costs they will have to sustain in many areas of life as various economies are introduced in the health services, in the education services, in the deprivation of immediate treatment for their children which will result in increasing illness, are the cutbacks in the maternity services which will invariably result in an increase in the infant mortality rate. Margaret Thatcher has the dubious distinction of being the first British Prime Minister in the past 30 years to preside over an increase in the infant mortality rate in Britain. I regret to say that I think the Taoiseach, Deputy Haughey, may well have the same dubious distinction in this country. They are the sort of things that are easily seen if one wants to look.
It is a regrettable fact that most of our society, and most of our politics, seem to choose to adjudicate on the commitment to the poor exclusively in terms of whether their increases are above or below the increase in the cost of living. There is far more to the plight of under-privileged people in our society, to oppressed people in our society than income.
Let me go through the other small things which have gone unnoticed but which seem to me to be part of a deliberate plan. There was, for instance, the decision to close the National Social Service Board which now appears to have been reversed but which did appear to be part of a strategy. There is the in some ways more serious decision to hamstring the Ombudsman. In a quite extraordinary decision to save a small sum of money the Ombudsman has been deprived of staff and has been compelled to make a special report to the Oireachtas which the Oireachtas so far has blissfully chosen to ignore. I know there is a motion on the Order Paper of this House from Fine Gael Members about the matter but we have not discussed it and, apparently, we will not discuss it. The consequence of the Ombudsman being deprived of his capacity to operate is that people who need welfare, or who need other State services, can be put on the long finger, can be delayed, can be slowed down, can be kept waiting and will not be in a position to assert their right to have their services provided because the one independent enforcement agency that was available to them has been taken from them. That will result in the oppression of the poor even further in our society.
When we go through detail upon detail of peripheral areas where unnecessary economies which could not be justified in terms of the overall needs are being made we see that they all end up oppressing the poor far more than anybody else. The Government have created a climate of hostility to the unemployed, have created a climate in which every innovation in the Department of Social Welfare, whether it be computerisation or anything else, is seen, highlighted and headlined as another attempt to deal with fraud. It is virtually impossible now to get a member of the Government, or of the Government party, to talk about the consistent, deliberate degradation which unemployed people have to go through in the process of signing on. We have a consistent, and I think deliberate, degradation underlying virtually every statement from the Minister for Social Welfare on the issue of welfare. It seems to be a consistent catalogue of anti-abuse campaigns as if abuse was the only problem in social welfare, as if the humiliation of the recipients was not an equal problem.
I referred to the apparently deliberate calculated undermining of the Combat Poverty Agency in this House before, to the three successive reductions in one year in their allocated budget, to the arbitrary, unplanned, unconsulted cut backs in the budget of that agency. I said at the time that it appeared to me to be mean-minded and vindictive and I repeat it now. The idea that the poor would be protected in a society where all the independent agencies who attempt to vindicate their rights are being hamstrung is a joke. It is a reflection on us, on the media, and on the governing party, that the Taoiseach could get away with that extraordinary assertion that there was no particular way in which one could see the poor carrying the burden of the cutbacks in public expenditure. The truth is that virtually nobody else has carried the burden of the cutbacks in public expenditure. Other people have been inconvenienced by the cutbacks, that I accept. I have been inconvenienced, the Members of this House, people in jobs, and people in houses have been inconvenienced but the only ones who have suffered from the cutbacks in public expenditure, who have suffered because they see the difference in their dignity, they see the difference in their standard of living in terms of basic commodities like health, education, housing, income and food, are the poor. That is the difference.
The idea that the burden is carried equally when some of us suffer an inconvenience while others suffer a gap in the fundamental needs of life, the idea that it is an equal burden because they take £2 off me and £2 off somebody on £35 a week is a joke. That is not carrying the burden equally. We have a society in which the economists say we have this extraordinary position where everything is taxed except those things that cannot move out of the country, where we tax the income of people who are employed and, if they do not like it, they can move. We tax goods and if the people do not like that they can smuggle them in but we do not tax property, we do not tax capital and we do not tax wealth which are precisely the things that nobody can move out of the country. That comes from a Government who claim not to be discriminating against the poor. They may not be discriminating against the poor as consciously as they are discriminating in favour of the rich but the outcome is exactly the same. The wealthy, the affluent, the powerful are protected, are cossetted, are rubbed up the right way.
We have now a culture of affluence, a culture of wealth in our society, where the vulgar display of wealth is something to be encouraged, something to be approved of. It is regarded as the sign of success, of enterprise and of achievement. We are now moving from the idea where vulgar displays of wealth and affluence were regarded as precisely that to a position of beginning to nod, approve and encourage these because they are supposed to be the signs of wealth and affluence. A society which adopts that as the criterion to measure its development is a society which has already discriminated against the poor, which has already judged the poor. That is the underlying philosophy.
The underlying philosophy, as The Irish Times said during the October crash, is based on the satisfying of the perceptions of the financial markets. The Irish Times said, quite perceptively at the time that two things motivate the financial marketplace: one is greed and the other is fear. If that statement had come from me it could be dismissed as left wing rhetoric but that was from an editorial in The Irish Times. Whatever The Irish Times was 20 years ago, or ten years ago, it is not now a left wing journal. I find it extraordinary that the whole of our country's economic strategy is based on developing an economic strategy which meets the demands of the financial marketplace and the financial marketplace is based on two things, greed and fear. Our society's economic strategy is based on satisfying the greed and the fear of the financial markets. That is most regrettable and that is why, inevitably, poor people will be the victims of what is going on. We cannot simultaneously satisfy the greed and the fear of the financial markets and satisfy the basic needs of the poor because satisfying the basic needs of the poor will produce an inevitable response in terms of the greed and fear of the rich.
Therefore, we give in to the rich and the powerful and in the process the poor are the victims. That is the most regrettable part of the present strategy. It is not permitted for me to talk about taxation on this motion but I would simply say there is considerable and increasingly well documented evidence that there are other remedies in terms of dealing with public expenditure. There is an increasing volume of information on that. Most of it stayed buried up until about three or four months ago but it comes to light as more and more people begin to wonder about what is going on. I do think at this stage that the idea that there is no alternative ought to be dismissed. The risks involved in various strategies are what we should be talking about.
I do not propose to say much more because many Members want to speak. It needs to be said, and it will continue to be said by myself, that what has been done in the past 12 months, and the greater dose of it that we are going to see in the next 12 months, is nothing less than the most concerted and best organised attack on the welfare, the housing conditions, the health conditions, the education conditions and the job opportunities of the poorest in our society. It is being done, sadly, by a party who used to build their strengths on their concerns for those people and who used to build their strength on a commitment to those people. That is part of the big tragedy of the past nine or ten months.
Perhaps, there were things that had to be done but many of the things that were done were not done because of financial constraints. Cutting back on the Combat Poverty Agency, on the National Social Service Board, on the Office of the Ombudsman, were not products of financial constraints. They were products of a strategy to quieten the poor, to shut them up, to effectively prevent them from complaining as their services deteriorated. They do not have the resources to take legal action. They do not have the resources to interest the media. They can only use the agencies that are available to them and those agencies are hamstrung. That is why it is becoming clear to me that, at the back of this strategy of cutbacks, lies the hand of not just a political party, or a Government Department, but of certain extremely influential economists who boast about the fact that they have been consulted, boast about the fact that they have had a major say in how cutbacks should be implemented and boast about the psychology which underlies those cutbacks. Anybody who wants to read more should read the reports in The Irish Times on the economic workshop meeting in Kenmare and they will see what I am talking about.
We are not talking about some sort of inevitable housekeeping of our finances. We are talking about an ideology and a philosophy and that ideology is anti-poor and pro-rich. That is why it is so regrettable that the Government's assault on the poor and the under-privileged has been so easily buried by the media because so few people, either in politics or in the media, have bothered to study in detail what is going on.
