I am sorry that at a festive season like this Deputy Allen is so grim and sombre as he appears to be this evening. He has been engaging in a lot of shadow boxing with all kinds of spectres, which in fact do not exist at all except in Deputy Allen's imagination. Deputy Allen owes a big debt of gratitude to his imagination for the facts are the converse of what he has produced this evening. All that Deputy Allen said on this Estimate is complete and unadulterated nonsense so far as the local authorities are concerned, and so far as the applicants for home assistance are concerned. Let us look at the facts. During the emergency, it was decided that unusual emergency measures would have to be taken to deal with certain problems. One of the devices resorted to in order to try and keep people above poverty and destitution standards of living was to give them assistance at the expense of the State in the form of food vouchers. But have we now, after 16 years of Fianna Fáil Government, reached a condition of affairs in which the maintenance of the food vouchers, with all the odium and all the taint of the poor law system that goes hand in hand with that odious system, represents the objective of Fianna Fáil as an explanation of Deputy Allen's speech and Deputy Little's fears expressed in a few short sentences?
Everybody with any conception of a decent outlook on life knows that the food voucher is the equivalent of the soup kitchen. Do we not know well that it is a degrading practice? Do we not know well that only the poor, the lonely, and the destitute are compelled to look for food vouchers? What is Deputy Allen's concept of his sense of independence, honour and pride, and what is Deputy Little's concept of his independence and pride that they now weep over the departure of the food voucher? Does any Deputy think it is a right and proper method of satisfying the human demands of people for decent standards of living to offer them paltry food vouchers which they could change in shops, labelled that they are people with food vouchers, that they are getting free food vouchers? I should have thought that a person like Deputy Little, especially, would be standing beside me, that he would think this food voucher scheme is a detestable scheme only justified in the direst emergency, that it is not a scheme that ought to be a permanent feature either of social services or welfare services.
The proposal which we introduced early in the year was to get rid of the detestable food vouchers so as to make sure that people were not going into grocery shops with food vouchers pasted over them, so that the rest of the community, the wealthy section of the community or those who are able to earn a modest competence, will be able to gaze at those recipients of food vouchers and extend to them the sympathy which ought rightfully to go to people placed in such a degrading and humilating position. The food voucher is gone, and I do not know any decent man or woman in this House or in the country who wants to recall that odious, detestable method of pasting on the poor people of this country labels which indicate that they are in impecunious circumstances. If Deputy Little wants to shed tears over the departure of the food voucher, let him do it, but he will have very little sympathy from decent-minded men and women at the departure of that contemptible device, justified only in the direst emergency, but certainly no longer justifiable in our circumstances.
Let me recall for Deputy Little's edification, because he seems to have a mental black-out on this business, that even his own Government in 1947 abolished some of the food vouchers and substituted for them cash payments. I did the very same thing in respect of home assistance recipients, because I thought that the maintenance of that scheme had nothing whatever to commend it to the House or to the country and was completely unjustified in present circumstances. Under the 1939 Public Assistance Act the responsibility is put on local authorities for the relief of destitution. That Act was passed by the Fianna Fáil Government and definitely put on the local authorities the responsibility of relieving destitution and acute need so far as applicants for home assistance are concerned. We said to the local authorities: In future, therefore, you have got to bear the responsibility which is properly and lawfully yours under the 1939 Public Assistance Act. This year, however, we will pay half the cost of the food vouchers, but next year you will take the responsibility which properly has been put on you under the 1939 Act, and you will relieve, as you are statutorily obliged to do, those who are compelled through economic necessity to seek the assistance of the local authorities to the extent that the local authorities have power under this Act to provide the necessary relief. That is all that is being done.
Deputy Allen says we are taking these food vouchers away from the recipients of home assistance. We told the local authorities that, with the abolition of the detestable food voucher and the badge of the poor law with which it was extensively impregnated, they should give to applicants for home assistance and outdoor relief at least a cash equivalent of the food voucher. Therefore, so far as the local applicant for relief is concerned, he was told, through the mouthpiece of this Government and from the platform of this Dáil, that the food voucher will go and all the odium with it, but that instead the local authority will be required, by a direction from the Government, to give to applicants for outdoor relief or home assistance at least the cash equivalent of the food vouchers. Therefore, the applicant in future could buy with cash out of his own pocket whatever commodities he liked and when he went to a shop to buy these commodities he would not be festooned with food vouchers, as he was up to the abolition of the scheme.
Does not everybody realise that it is very much better to give a man or woman cash so that when they go to a grocery shop they can buy in the way Deputy Little or Deputy Allen buys? Is there any special reason why people should be put in a special, untouchable category and say:—"These are folk who cannot buy as the rest of the citizens buy; they have to buy through the medium of the food voucher and all that that implies"? I will debate this with Deputy Little in Waterford or Deputy Allen in Wexford. I think that everybody that wants to preserve the independence of our people and to give them a pride in their right to be independent will express nothing but gratification at the passing of the food voucher, because we have substituted cash for the food voucher which is now gone.
Now look at it from another point of view. Deputy Allen wailed about the effect of this on local authorities. So far as local authorities are concerned, it means about 1¼d. in the rates, on an average. That is what they have to face up to, but not this year, because they have only to face up to half that this year. What are we doing for the local authorities instead of that? The last Government would not raise old age pensions except by a miserable 2/6, and they said to the local authorities: "But you can give them something more, if you are satisfied that they are absolutely destitute." Some of the responsibility for giving that something more fell on the local authorities. That is now coming off the local authorities, because, as from 7th January next, the old age pensioner will not have his old age pension made up of two components, (1) the State's ald-age pension; (2) the trifle which the old-age pensioner receives from the local authority through the medium of the home assistance officer. In future the State will accept full responsibility for the old-age pension, and not full responsibility for an old-age pension at the rate payable in the past, but full responsibility for an old-age pension which is higher now than it ever was since the old-age pension was introduced in 1908.
