For a six hour day that is £1.66 per hour. On a quick calculation, if you are talking about a restaurant, wages of £10 a day distributed over 50 or 100 meals works out at around 20 pence per meal. Even if that was doubled it would not account for the cost of meals. The truth is that the general provision of services in this country is appallingly inefficient, badly thought out, unimaginative, and depending on high prices for small volume rather than reasonable prices for high volume.
I know, without a shadow of a doubt, that the price of labour, food and property is considerably greater in Germany, for instance, than it is here. Yet, one can pass through a dozen restaurants on a street in Frankfurt and get food of a quality that would only be available in cordon bleu restaurants here. It is a fraction of the price you would pay for a crude meal of chicken and chips in many restaurants in Irish holiday resorts. It is not the price of labour that is the cause of their meals being cheaper than ours. It is well-run services, well-run premises, run by people who are able to meet both their commercial targets and their social obligations.
I am astonished at the suggestion of £10 a day as a wage rate, particularly when one realises that the chances are that the majority of these people would be women. We are simply further consigning women to a role of something close to servitude in what is supposed to be a working environment.
The Appropriation Bill is essentially about public expenditure and public expenditure is now a bad thing. Every single international organisation, in particular the OECD, but also the International Monetary Fund, has its ideologically beady eye on public expenditure. The first thing they tell any country with a problem is that they must reduce public expenditure and, if they are pushed, they will say they must reduce expenditure on health, education, welfare, housing and food subsidies. They have this extraordinary selectivity so that they target those areas. They never tell people they must reduce expenditure on armaments or State security but that is an issue for another day.
I would like to insist that quite the opposite is the truth. Public expenditure is a good thing. It has been a major contributor to the quality of life in western Europe. The quality of housing, education, infrastructure, health care, and low infant mortality all over western Europe, have been possible because of public expenditure. The United States have failed miserably to provide anything like the same success, having taken the preferred route of most of our ideological advisers about public expenditure.
Public expenditure is a good thing. Public expenditure via moderately high taxes is a good thing, it works well and does not stifle enterprise. There is no empirical evidence to suggest that relatively high levels of taxation stifle enterprise. There is a sense of grievance among some people who are relatively successful who believe they are paying too much tax. They express this as a detached objective feeling that it is deterring other people from enterprise, but I do not believe, and I know that there is no empirical evidence to suggest, that high levels of public expenditure deter enterprise. If high levels of public expenditure deterred enterprise, then the Swedish, Danish and Norwegian economies would have been going down the tubes for the past 20 years, because it is about 20 years since public expenditure, as a proportion of GNP, in Sweden and Denmark passed out the level we are at today. If the ideological insistence on reducing public expenditure was based on any empirical evidence, those two countries would have been in terminal decline for the past 20 years. They manifestly are not, they are successful thriving economies working extremely well.
The idea that public expenditure is a bad thing is one of those things that is now almost accepted almost without question. The usual line in any newspaper editorial, in any passing commentary, even by people in RTE who are not supposed to editorialise, is that Governments must reduce public expenditure, in order to reduce taxes, in order to encourage job creation. No evidence has been provided by anybody to suggest that those three connections operate. The famous — I would suggest, notorious — Culliton report in its introduction makes that equation without a scrap of empirical evidence to sustain it. I believe the proper way to develop an economy, to develop a country, is to have efficient levels of public services of a quality that makes a decent contribution to people's lives. There is no point in putting together public services that are so bad that people do not want to use them and we are liable to do that if we allow ourselves to be bounced into this daft notion that public expenditure is anything other than a good thing.
I believe in public expenditure and the other Members of both Houses of the Oireachtas when they bother to think about it also believe in it because they want good health care, good housing and good education and they know the only way to achieve these is by collective State provision. Nobody has found another effective way of doing it.
This Appropriation Act contains a considerable number of items that merit discussion. I did a quick sum and discovered that the total provision for State security is 28 times higher than the provision for Overseas Development Aid. Last year we spent £316 million on the Garda; £317 million on the Armed Forces and £82 million on the Prison Service, a total of £715 million. In the same period we spent £25 million on Overseas Development Aid and that figure was boosted by a politically tainted contribution to what were described as the victims of the Gulf War, which did not include the innocent citizens of Iraq. The contribution was made to external countries who as good boys took the western line and were compensated ultimately by a fund. That obscene contribution was inserted in the figure for overall contribution to Overseas Development Aid and used to prove how well we contributed last year.
This year that sum has been taken out; the claim is that it does not represent a reduction because it was a once off provision. What is particularly shameful about the level of State expenditure on ODA is that while the Government is the stingiest perhaps of OECD Governments in terms of percentage of GNP contributed to people who are poor in a way we cannot imagine, voluntary donations from Irish people are the most generous in the OECD as a percentage of GNP. That trend has persisted through the eighties in spite of recessions, unemployment, hardship and what some people describe as high tax. Irish people are generous and are betrayed by a Government using a soft target and an easy option to reduce public expenditure.
The phrase "bankrupt country cannot afford to give aid to anybody" which surfaced during the famous star chamber investigations of the late eighties into public expenditure was made by an eminent economist who presided over an analysis of all Departments' expenditure. It is a shameful record and a betrayal of the Irish people's own spontaneous generosity. It ought to be remedied and if the Government want a suggestion I suggest that we cross off £50 million of our defence expenditure. Much of the defence budget is spent on items like the FCA which serves no other purpose than to give people the opportunity to spend a few weeks playing at being toy soldiers. We could do without this and could spend the money saved on Overseas Development Aid and to encourage increasing numbers of our under-utilised workforce to spend a period working in development aid. This will not happen because the idealogues who run both our thought processes and our governments do not approve of public expenditure and want to reduce it everywhere except in the areas of defence where they always blink and pretend not to notice. This has happened in most major European countries. Those who thought that public expenditure should be reduced in Britain blinked as their defence budget remained as it had been when Britain had a colonial empire, spending four times proportionately as much as France on so called defence. We are doing that here now.
Public expenditure can be made more efficient by openness, by accountability and the office that can do that most efficiently is the Ombudsman. It is a scandalous under-funding to leave only a fraction of a million pounds to the Office of Ombudsman. I know this amount is bigger than it use to be, but it leaves the Ombudsman based largely in Dublin with two-thirds of the country at a remove and therefore at a disadvantage. It could be different; the lack of will to change it deserves further comment.
I do not want to go through a catalogue of areas of expenditure but to dwell on one area, expenditure on social welfare. For reasons beyond my comprehension what the Department of Social Welfare do to unemployed people is a matter of absolute indifference to the liberal establishment in this country. It gives travellers the Star of David treatment every Thursday morning at a fixed time in every labour exchange. One can count the travellers in a town by going to the labour exchange at 11.30 on a Thursday morning because that is when they have to be there. If we did this to any other group there would be outrage but the liberal establishment apparently blinks at this because these people are travellers and unemployed. That is not the end of what the Department of Social Welfare do to unemployed people. They give them an income which is barely adequate; they then attach conditions to that income that would do justice to the most bizarre and Byzantine complications of Franz Kafka's The Trial, they tell people that in order to be eligible for money they must be available for work and actively seeking employment.
This is the interesting testimony of people in various parts of the country. One signs on at the labour exchange and if one is single the first question asked is why one is not living at home. I know of a 30 year old single woman who worked for years in England. She came back to Dublin, her family lived down the country and the first question she was asked in the labour exchange was why she was not living with her parents. Her parents lived 60 miles away. It was grossly humilitating to suggest to an adult woman that she make herself a dependant again.
The next trick is to check one's address. If the person is not there when they arrive they regret that they have to postpone payment for another week because they could not confirm the address. If the person is there they will imply that she/he is not looking for work. "If you were looking for work you would be out looking for it; what are you doing hanging around at home all day?" If one is not available regularly when they come they will suggest that you are not available for work but are doing something else and, therefore, are "fiddling". This practice does not take place on an occasional basis; it happens on a cyclical basis to people who have been unemployed in some cases for one, two or three years. I have a letter in my files from a 52 year old man who worked for 37 years continuously through recessions and good periods; He was made redundant at 52 which most would acknowledge as a difficult age at which to find new employment. Within three months of signing on at the labour exchange he was told he was being cut off because he had not made sufficient efforts to look for work.
That pattern repeats itself in every Irish labour exchange and nobody gives a tuppenny damn. It is never written about or commented upon; there are no eloquent features about it. We get the occasional series of articles, usually during the "silly season" in August about what it is like to be unemployed. For most of the people most of the time this persecution is invisible; it demands that people be actively seeking employment, genuinely looking for work. I can genuinely look for anything that exists but I cannot look for something that does not exist. I do not know where to look for it, where to find it and I do not know how I am supposed to prove that I am looking for it if I do not know where it is. Work in this country does not exist except as Senator Farrell said at £50 a week slave labour in a restaurant. I do not think any other Member of this House believes in that sort of thing. For the rest work is unavailable, work does not exist; yet, the Department of Social Welfare insist that every person on the dole should look for work.
Let me tell you about that Department's tricks. It will not allow a person produce letters to box numbers in the paper as evidence of work sought. If one producers a copy of the Evening Press and proves one sent letters to box numbers given in job advertisements, the Department of Social Welfare would say that was not good enough, one was not really looking for work. Box numbers do not suffice. One is expected to plead on bended knee with employers to obtain a letter confirming that one applied to the employer for work and that work was not available.
The Department of Social Welfare had no right to humiliate people. Conditions laid down to regulate eligibility for social welfare when work was available are now being used to effect perhaps the most rigid social control that exists outside what used to be eastern Europe. Some 250,000 people who are perceived to be a possible threat to the State are treated to what on the surface is meant to be a system of benevolent care but which demands personal humiliation and subjugation in exchange for the State pittance. Labour exchanges around the country do not do this all the time but a cyclical pattern has been created. People working with the unemployed allude to this maltreatment regularly.
When one raises this matter with a Government Minister one is told the staff have clear guidelines on it which sounds very good. Yet, when one asks if unemployed people may have a copy of the guidelines to know what conditions they have to meet, one is told the guidelines are confidential. We have a situation where 250,000 people are told they must satisfy the Department of Social Welfare that they are looking for work. How do they do that? The Department cannot tell them it is up to them to find out. How do they prove they are seeking work? The Department will say; it is up to them to prove it. What is proof? The Department will not say. What is a lack of effort? Again, the Department will not say. Every so often when pushed the Department suggest that people try the next town, or the next parish. Half the time they say one should have more letters from more employers.
Social welfare recipients in West Cork live in such a remote area that there would not be any reasonable expectation of finding work there and the Department of Social Welfare disqualify people on the grounds that work is unavailable in this area. I interpret that as a directive to leave the area and move to the cities where one can go through the pretence of work being available.
Such treatment of the unemployed is the most systematised, cruel and most invisible persecution of a minority in any civilised western European country today. Nobody gives two pence about it, in politics, media or anywhere else, with the glorious exception of some of the Churches and their agencies who have seen what is being done to unemployed people. The abuse experienced by unemployed people does not impinge on and is not part of the experience of any of us in jobs, we do not have to go through this process, therefore, it is not on our list of social concerns.
This condition of one's availability for work is used to discriminate particularly against women. The number of women I have met who have been asked who will mind the children if they go to work, is endless. The number of men I know who have been asked a similar question, unless they are a single parent, is zero. This condition is used consistently all around the country to persecute women.
The Department of Social Welfare play glorious tricks on women. They tell them to do a FÁS scheme where they will be paid £40 or £50 a week, about the same as the dole. When a woman says she will have to pay somebody to mind her children and, therefore, cannot do it for that money they decide she is not available for work. Of course she would be available for work if the work paid a decent wage which would enable her to pay somebody to mind the children. She is then cut off the dole, one more victory, one numberless, another attempt to keep the unemployment figures from being seen as the obscene spectacle they are.
Again, the Minister will say clear directions are given to officials not to discriminate against women but those directions or guidelines remain confidential, a matter for internal report. Women are left with an assurance from a male Minister that the officials of his Department who, at senior levels given the structure of the Civil Service are predominantly male, are not prejudiced against them in principle even though they know the question of who will mind the children will be pursued vigorously. If they attempt to suggest that a sister, who is perhaps a single mother or is unemployed herself or on deserted wife's allowance might mind the children then the Department of Social Welfare will descend on the sister and say, "We understand you will be paid by your sister. Are you really available for work yourself?" The sister will get the treatment. In the west of Ireland this issue was second only to the rod licence controversy during the last general election.
Bhí eolas agam ar cheist na "gaugers" i gConamara le linn an toghcháin deiridh agus ba mhór an cheist í in iarthar na tíre.
Stories abound about the famous Department of Social Welfare outdoor investigation branch, as my colleague Deputy Stagg outlined in the Dáil before Christmas. Officials inspected people's fingernails for dirt to ascertain if they had been working that day. They inspected the soles of their shoes for mud. They actually rubbed their hands to see if they were horny from work. A woman in the midlands was asked by an official where she got a fur coat. If she was genuinely unemployed the implication was that she should not be able to afford a fur coat. Others were asked how they could arrive in a car if they were unemployed? I have documented hundreds of these cases which occur all over the country. It is time this abuse ended. If this country cannot supply work for people, could it not at least leave them their dignity? That matter should be addressed by anybody who cares about minority rights.
These measures affect 270,000 people directly and their spouses and children indirectly. It is as good a way of breaking people's spirits as any I could imagine; it is systematic, widespread, consistent and cruel. The situation is not alleviated by smart ass comentators writing trivia in the media about welfare abuse. A major international consultancy firm, Craig Gardner conducted a study and found that not more than 1.5 per cent of welfare expenditure in Dublin city could be suspected of being misappropriated. The corollary to this finding is that 98.5 per cent of welfare expenditure is deemed appropriate. It is manifestly wrong to persecute 98.5 per cent of welfare recipients in order, allegedly, to catch the 1.5 per cent guilty of abuse.
On the same issue, I denounce the scam underlying the alleged generous expenditure on social welfare in Ireland. The taxpayers' element of social welfare expenditure has barely increased in real terms since 1987 and dropped in absolute terms for a couple of years. The social welfare budget has been augmented; payments have been extended to the self-employed while at the same time, eligibility for pay-related benefits has been reduced by increasing the number of contributions necessary before payment begins.
Pay-related benefit has been reduced in value. The social insurance fund has gone from deficit to surplus. The State contribution needed to top up the social insurance fund has been dramatically reduced so that the actual net contribution of taxpayers to the alleviation of poverty has gone down in real terms in spite of the upsurge in unemployment, and despite the small but welcome increase in payment rates. What the State has done is to make self-employed people, many of them poor themselves, carry the can for the general taxpayer, many of whom are quite well off.
The central issue is something like this. Without addressing each item in turn I assert that public expenditure is a good thing. If we did not have the ingrained hostility to public expenditure that now dominates most economic and political thinking we would not need to witness the persecution of 250,000 unemployed people nor the hostility shown by many commentators to the public sector per se in outrageous remarks about public sector pay. Opposition to public spending means that inefficiencies are highlighted while good quality service is not commented on. We would not suffer any of these consequences if we had the sort of perspective on public expenditure that an intelligent rational forward-looking western European democracy ought to have. Our problem is that we are dominated by people who, for biased and ideologically based motives, pretend to us that public expenditure is inherently inefficient, that it inhibits enterprise and somehow puts pressure on ordinary people.
Public expenditure is our security; it protects us all. It provides education for our children and national health care because VHI costs for those of us privileged to be in it, would be more expensive were it not subsidised by public expenditure. Public expenditure is the bedrock of a civilised society. Those societies that do not have a decent level of public expenditure, i.e. in the region of 40 per cent of gross national product, are not only short-sighted but fundamentally uncivilised.
