I had only just begun to speak when the debate on this Bill was adjourned. I indicated that it is not simply a question of a lack of education or a lack of opportunities which creates poverty. Fundamentally it is the absence of an adequate income for those who are caught in the poverty trap. Our society allows extremes of wealth and extremes of poverty to exist side by side. The scale of poverty in our society is now such that it is openly admitted that one in three of our population is either on or below the poverty line. That is at a time when we read newspaper headlines which indicate that there was a boom year for shares. In the Irish Independent of 30 December 1985, Mr. Cyril Hardiman of the financial staff said:
Shareholders in Irish companies have every reason to look back on 1985 with joy and hope for more of the same in 1986.
For share prices rose by an average of 40 per cent over the past year — adding a massive £700 million to the value of their investments.
And, just for good measure, Ireland's Top Fifty quoted companies between them increased their dividend payments to their shareholders by £10 million.
By year's end, Allied Irish Banks has firmly regained its position as Ireland's biggest publicly-quoted company. Commanding a Stock Market capitalisation — the present value of all its shares — of £386 million, it has opened up a lead of some £33 million over arch rival, the Bank of Ireland in second place.
Just three months ago, however, the placings were reversed, with AIB still very much under the cloud of last March's Insurance Corporation collapse. But once the Government cleared the air about the ICI's refinancing, investors piled back into AIB shares.
Falling interest rates reduced inflation and — above all else — invigorating profitability all contributed to the rise in share prices during the year.
We also know that in 1985 we had the highest unemployment figures ever. We know that the poor had possibly one of the hardest years to survive in 1985. There is clearly a poverty problem and an imbalance in the distribution of wealth and poverty. Parties in this House apply themselves to that problem in different ways.
The main parties, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, have an approach to poverty which leaves the present social relationships completely untouched. They will argue, as did the Minister for Finance on the radio this morning, that private enterprise should do what they are expected to do by the Government and take up incentives to take on workers. What the Minister for Finance said is fundamental to the thinking of Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil in tackling poverty. They believe that one has only to encourage private enterprise to be enterprising to eliminate poverty and create jobs. What has occurred since the foundation of the State indicates that private enterprise, particularly Irish capitalism, has not the capacity to eliminate poverty here despite all the protection they received in the thirties and forties and all the urgings they received in the fifties and sixties and despite the various reports on improving their efficiency and their capacity to compete. Despite all the urgings and incentives by way of grants and assistance which were increased yesterday by the Minister for Finance, more and more people are entering the poverty trap.
I cannot say much for the views of the Progressive Democrats because they have not yet produced policy documents but I would argue that the Labour Party, on the basis of their policy documents, would agree with me that a fundamental change is required not only as to the question of whether or not poverty can be cured by providing incentives to private enterprise but that we need a fundamental change in our approach to the questions of private property and the virtually unlimited rights of private property in our society. We need to have a fundamental change in our approach to how jobs are created. The Labour Party in the past would have argued that there must be a comprehensive involvement by the State in the development of our resources not simply by providing incentives, although that cannot be ruled out for progressive companies, but by the State becoming directly involved in developing resources, providing jobs and in increasing GNP so that people who are at present unemployed can be employed and that that would have the effect of significantly reducing unemployment.
Despite all the arguments about how to define poverty the fundamental definition is that a poor person has not enough on which to live and I am not talking about just existing. Many people are living quiet lives of desperation. They have barely enough to eat and from time to time to buy a coat or a pair of shoes but the quality of their lives is such that they are poor. Other aspects arise from the inadequacy of income. People born into poverty find it very difficult to get out of that trap. Because of generations of poverty people end up in ghettos and they are traditionally discriminated against in terms of the education they can get. Yesterday I raised a question with the Minister for Education about teacher-pupil ratios and the Minister said that our pupil-teacher ratio had been reduced from 27.5 pupils per teacher to 27.1 pupils per teacher. That, to the Minister, seemed a very big improvement. The Minister also said that to bring the pupil-teacher ratio to the level of that existing in Northern Ireland, which is by no means an exemplary one, we would need to employ 3,000 extra national primary school teachers. At the same time the Government have announced a reduction in the training capacity for teachers. The teacher-pupil ratios are applied to all schools irrespective of the needs. The areas which most need extra teachers are the areas which by and large are losing teachers. In a school in my area teachers who have dedicated ten years of their lives to assisting some of the most deprived of our young children are being placed on a panel because numbers have fallen in the schools, and may in the next year be transferred to another area, to another school, resulting, as it has already in the school I am speaking about, in a number of classes being doubled up.
We cannot talk seriously about tackling poverty through this agency if we do not also talk about the question and what resources are provided in this area for the most disadvantaged in our society. It is pointless to talk about setting up a poverty agency while Government policy is directed towards creating greater disadvantage in those areas which are already suffering the most. We are perpetuating educational poverty by pursuing the policies which the Government have enunciated in their national plan in relation to education. I am talking about the cutbacks in the public service, the reduction in teacher training and that whole area. We cannot accept that they are serious about tackling the problem of poverty.
It is admitted openly that one in three of the population are now living below the poverty line. This affects the family quite seriously, and obviously it affects children, young adults, people who are sick and people on pensions. Poverty eats like a cancer into every aspect of the lives of those affected by it. In relation to the family it means that parents lose the ability to control their lives or the lives of their children. It means the loss of ability to decide not only where they might live but what they may eat, what they may wear, what schools the children may go to and for how long they may go to school. Statistics show clearly that once in the povery trap very few manage to get out of it.
According to an ESRI report published in July 1984, 75 per cent of those in higher professional and managerial employment came from just four of the upper ABC social classes. In England and Wales the comparative figure was 47 per cent. In 1980-81, 10 per cent of male post primary school leavers left without any qualification but only half of 1 per cent of upper social class male students were in the same category. More than 17 per cent of students from unskilled and semi skilled families left school without any qualification whatsoever. Unemployment data from 1982 showed that of unemployed people between the ages of 15 and 24 years only 4.7 per cent came from the higher professional and managerial classes while 52 per cent were from semi skilled and unskilled backgrounds.
In my area, Finglas and Ballymun, over 50 per cent in some cases of people between the ages of 15 and 25 years are unemployed. At the same time in an area like Castleknock the level of unemployment is 4.7 per cent. In the Tallaght area The Workers' Party carried out a survey of an estate and found a 54 per cent unemployment level there, not in the whole of Tallaght but in an estate there. To conclude on the statistics I have referred to, only 1 per cent of people from the postal areas of Dublin 1 and 10 go on to higher education. In Dublin 11, which includes my constituency, the figure is 7 per cent, but in Dublin 14 it is 30 per cent and in Dublin 24 it is 44 per cent. In UCD only 0.57 per cent of the students come from unskilled manual backgrounds.
Clearly society here discriminates against the poor, not deliberately in the sense that someone decides that these people are not going to get education or jobs, but inherently the structures of our society discriminate against those who are poorest and favour those who are best off in terms of income and wealth and who are best educated.
I do not deny the great efforts which the staff of AnCO put into training those who come to them but in most cases those people who do six week, six month or 12 month courses are being trained for nonexistent jobs. People caught in poverty face many frustrations. Not only are they being denied employment or serious training for real and useful employment, but also they are usually forced to exist on pocketmoney from parents when those parents can afford it, or at best very minimal unemployment assistance support. Of course, you do not qualify for unemployment assistance support until you are 18 years of age. If you leave school when you are 15 or 16 years you are not entitled to any support from the State. You cannot sign on or get unemployment assistance. Even when you reach 18 years of age the unemployment assistance you get, if you remain at home living with your parents, is means tested, in some cases out of existence.
Recently I put down a series of questions in relation to unemployment assistance to try to figure out exactly how the means test works and how it could be improved so that those who are living at home at 18 years of age and over can get some kind of half decent, dignified income. Fundamentally when you look at it you realise that the only way it can be done is for the State to decide that every person is entitled to a basic income. I have not got the new Social Welfare Bill here but, as far as I can recall, the figure for unemployment assistance when the increases are applied—which will not be until the middle of July—is £36 for a single person, assuming that the person lives in an urban area and is entitled to the full amount. Does anyone argue seriously in this House that any one of us here could survive on £36 per week even living at home with parents? Certainly I could not. If I were living in a flat and trying to survive on £36 per week quite a number of things would not be paid for and it would be quite an incentive for me to become disenchanted with or alienated from the political process that exists and persists in maintaining me in that miserly fashion.
That unemployment assistance does not apply just to young people. It applies to any single person, irrespective of age, once that person lives at home and one of his or her parents is working and earning an income. I have come across a case where a man of 50 years of age is getting £12 a week unemployment assistance because he is living at home. That must surely be totally unacceptable to anyone with any concern for the ordinary, decent dignity of a human being. This Poverty Agency Bill will not tackle that kind of problem. The only people who can tackle it are the legislators in this House.
The young people in particular are denied the opportunity of being trained for real jobs. Poverty therefore is preventing young people from developing skills, enjoying the full flavour of life and settling down in a good environment. Those on social welfare payments cannot in themselves combat poverty. Indeed, most people who are in receipt of these payments would rather be working and working in a well paid job. Those on social welfare in the main are unpleasant by-products of the existing conditions in our society. Those in our society who are poorest are to an extraordinary degree also those who have least privacy. If you are a local authority tenant there is not a single aspect of your life which is not investigated by rent inspectors. If you are on unemployment assistance, or an unmarried mother, or a deserted wife, there is not a single aspect of your life which is private to you, which is not open to investigation by social welfare field officers.
Contrast that with the arguments made in relation to tax dodgers and in relation to those who make a livelihood out of avoiding tax. We are told that we must not infringe the privacy of these people, that the question of what they earn or do not earn is a matter for themselves, that it would be improper to divulge in any way the names of tax dodgers. At the same time, hundreds of thousands who are dependent on social welfare, living in local authority housing, the poorest in our society in effect, are subjected daily to an invasion of their privacy.
Not only that, but the practice has grown up in the Dublin Corporation area that rent inspectors will no longer accept your word when you state your income or even a social welfare form which states what that income is. Inspectors will be sent out around your area who will make inquiries of neighbours and watch your house to see whether you have a car and if anybody goes into or out of your house, to see if they stay overnight. If any inspector is told or believes that you have not divulged your full income, he is not obliged to give the information on which he bases that belief. He simply applies the maximum rent for your accommodation. Then you will have to prove that the inspector is wrong. This, of course, in many cases is quite impossible as the inspectors refuse to divulge the basis on which their decisions were made in the first place. I believe that what is happening in Dublin Corporation in this regard is illegal. I am at present looking to see if I can locate a suitable case so that it may be tested in the courts. It is my belief that many, not all, of the corporation tenants are being abused, frightened and intimidated into paying rents which they are not legally obliged to pay.
These are all aspects of the lives of people who are basically living in poverty. If they were not poor, they would not have to put up with that kind of treatment. They would not have to put up with the indignity of having to appear before officials and plead for an explanation as to why their rent has been increased from £12 to £20 a week, or to plead with them for an explanation as to why they got a bill last week showing that they owed £20 and this week a bill showing that they owed £700. If you are not poor, you do not have to put up with that kind of thing. The indignities heaped on the poor in our society is one of the main reasons for an increasing decline in respect for politics, for politicians and for this House. People no longer see politicians or this House as being relevant or able to do anything for them. They may at times in a crisis run to their local TD or councillor when threatened with eviction and may feel that the councillor or TD has some power to stop that. Otherwise they do not see politicians as having the power, or even the willingness, to change society and its operation in order to provide them and their children with a better life.
When I talk about present conditions I mean the present relationship between capital and labour in our society. That is not the kind of social relationship that I want to see because the present society is based on greed, on the ability of one person to exploit another. If you cannot exploit your neighbour successfully you cannot make a profit. It has always struck me as odd that in a society which prides itself on being Christian — and, indeed, there are those who pride themselves on this being a Roman Catholic society — that this exultation of greed, capitalism and the ability to exploit another sits so easily side by side with the belief that we have a Christian, a Roman Catholic society. As far as I am concerned the two are totally contradictory. If we really understood what Christianity was about, we would not tolerate the conditions in which the poor have to live, the exploitation which takes place of the poor and the working class.
Doles, no matter what you call them, are demeaning and not desired by the poor or the working class in this society. What they want is the right to work in a well paid job. The present economic crisis has divided those who have to work for a living and who if unemployed would have to collect the dole, from those who are employed. When employment is lost there is a dismal slide into poverty. The first months without a job are often cushioned by redundancy payments and pay-related benefits, but, even in those circumstances, in the budget this year we have again reduced pay-related benefits. Where a man or woman having worked many years in a particular job gets redundancy payments for the loss of earnings for the following ten or 20 years, once the unemployment and pay-related benefits run out, that redundancy payment is means tested and the person's income falls again. If the condition of unemployment remains over a period, the redundancy payment and pay-related benefits only delay the onset of the full rigours of poverty. People on unemployment benefit receive only a pittance grudgingly handed over after every possible deduction has been made from it.
This is the policy of the present Government, and it is the policy traditionally followed by all Governments on this island. It is a policy which forces an ever increasing section of the population to live without dignity and without reasonable comfort. It is beyond question that many of our young people are rejecting the present social order which for them means one law for the rich and one law for the poor. They are rejecting the establishment/media attitude which calls for increased penalties for vandals while, at the same time, praising the immoral standards, practices, ambitions and values of a vulgar elitist society.
One aspect of poverty which applies more to women than it does to men is in the growth of part time work. In areas where this category of worker has been traditionally employed, they find their hours cut and they are being forced to do more work in fewer hours. Women are employed for fewer than 18 hours a week and thereby do not come under the normal protection which the existing labour law applies if a person works more than 18 hours a week. It also reduces their entitlements to social welfare and therefore reduces their protection if they become unemployed, are dismissed or are made redundant for whatever reason. There are considerable structures in our society which not only prevent people from getting out of the poverty trap but more and more demean them and ensure that they drift further away from what one might term normal society.
I am particularly concerned about a concerted campaign by some sections of the media and by a number of public representatives who are exaggerating to an extraordinary extent the nature and extent of social welfare abuse. It is an indisputable fact that abuse does take place. The Department of Social Welfare have estimated that this abuse costs about £2.4 million but we have public representatives and the media screaming from the rooftops that their is abuse to the tune of £25 million. They immediately link that with paying £60 million to deserted wives and unmarried mothers. In my view not only is that totally untrue but it is creating fears among those who are receiving social welfare.
Last Friday evening I got a phone call from a man in a south Dublin suburb who was concerned about the fact that he was living in a rural area as defined by the administrative local authority boundaries in Dublin. As a result of that, he was on a lower level of unemployment assistance and he was not entitled to a fuel voucher. That is not extraordinary because there are hundreds of thousands of people in that position, but what was extraordinary was that this elderly man was afraid to give me his name and address. He said he had been reading in the Irish Independent about these social welfare spongers and he was afraid that, if he gave me his name and address, in some way it would get to the local labour exchange and his unemployment assistance would be cut off, not because he was not entitled to it. He had got the impression from the media that there was a campaign against people on social welfare. Not only are we expecting these people to live on a pittance, but some of our public representatives are driving them to fear that they may even lose the few shillings they get each week.
I do not want to be read as defending social welfare abuse because I am not but I am trying to defend the right of those who, through no fault of their own, are unemployed, sick, disabled or have reached old age. They have a right to support from the rest of us who live in some kind of dignity and they should not have to live in fear, and certainly not as a result of headlines created to some extent by public representatives in this House.
The issue has been raised by these public representatives concerning deserted wives and unmarried mothers, and they have quoted £60 million as being paid to these women. They have gone even further and claimed that in many of these cases, if not most, the deserted wives are not living as separated wives and that unmarried mothers deliberately become pregnant in order to collect the unmarried mother's allowance. It seems extraordinary that on the one hand we have the same people arguing day in and day out that we must not have divorce because we must protect the family, that we must do everything we can to stop the trail of women to Britain to have abortions, and on the other hand, arguing that we should not be supporting deserted wives with children. A deserted wife under 40 years of age without children will not get a deserted wife's allowance.
If one is an unmarried mother, unless one is looking after one's child, one does not receive an unmarried mother's allowance. One cannot parade as a person who is trying to protect the family and children while, at the same time, attacking the support which taxpayers — by and large the PAYE sector — have chosen to give to the children of deserted wives and of unmarried mothers. That is a totally contradictory position. It is also totally contradictory to the Christian ethics about which this country so proudly boasts day after day, year in year out. One gets sick of it sometimes.
I wrote to the Department of Social Welfare for some statistics in relation to deserted wife's and unmarried mother's allowance over the past five years. In 1985 I ascertained there were 5,165 women in receipt of deserted wife's allowance. They had 9,472 dependent children. In addition there were 3,965 deserted wives on deserted wife's allowance who had 6,240 dependent children, that is, a total of over 9,000 deserted wives with 16,000 dependent children. If those who criticise the deserted wife's allowance decide that it should be withdrawn, what then do we say about the support of the family and the care of children?
The other aspect is the unmarried mother's allowance and this idea that young women parade the streets looking for suitable begetters of their children. Were it not so serious it would be worth smiling at. If it was not creating the fear that it does, we could laugh at it. I might give some statistics with regard to unmarried mothers. I sought figures going back to the year 1981. For example, in 1981 the number of applicants for unmarried mother's allowance was 2,413 — 86 of those were withdrawn, 2,000 were awarded and 372 rejected. In that year, of those already in receipt of unmarried mother's allowance, 1,117 allowances were terminated mainly because the young women concerned had got married. For each year that was the picture.
Up to 1985 the number of applicants was 3,352, the number withdrawn 73, the number awarded 2,800, the number rejected as being ineligible 349 and the number terminated in respect of those no longer eligible was 1,632. The total number in receipt of unmarried mother's allowance was 11,530, an increase of 1,500 over the previous year even though 3,300 had applied during that year.
