“My life is a balance between heating my home or feeding my children”. That is not exaggeration or scaremongering. Rather, those are the precise words - I took them down when she spoke at the briefing in the audiovisual room - of a disabled woman who is facing the impact of these horrific and cruel cuts from the Government. To attempt to shame the Opposition for speaking this truth and reflecting this reality and say that we are scaremongering in some way is very poor form on the part of the Government. This is the life people are living. I thank the Social Democrats for bringing forward this important motion. I do not thank the Government for bringing forward its shameful countermotion. The Government likes to talk a lot about targeting supports. That is its big talking point on this issue. It is targeting all right. Incredibly, the Government, during a time when it has a significant budget surplus, has targeted disabled people. There is no question about that. It has targeted disabled people for particularly cruel cuts. We know that, incredibly, the budget made almost everyone worse off. People who do not own big fast food restaurants, who have not developed a bunch of apartments or who are not big landlords have basically been made them worse off. The budget made the poorest even more worse off, and it made disabled people the worst off. It has been said again and again but cannot be said enough that the disabled support grant has been cut by €400, that the living alone allowance lump sum of €200 is being cut, that the fuel allowance is being reduced for disabled people with a net loss of €160 and that the October double payment of €254 and the electricity credits of €250 have been cut. The total value of cuts for disabled people is €1,404. That is utterly shameful. It is worth noting – I always try to make this point when we are talking about this issue – that in the context the same budget in which the Government took such a cruel approach to disabled people, Google walked in the front door of the Department of Finance and had a meeting with the Minister for Finance in which it asked that the research and development tax credit be increased by 5%, from 30% to 35%. What did the Government say? It said, “Yes, no problem. There you go. Here is €300 million”. That is public money going to Google when it would cost less than that to implement what is being asked for here, namely an emergency winter disability payment for those people who have been affected by these awful cuts. We know - the Government knows too - that the cost of having a disability in this country in 2021 was over €10,000. Today, it is around €15,000. While the official at risk of poverty rate is 32.5%, when the cost of disability is added, the risk of poverty increases to between 65% and 76%. We know that 39% of those who are unable to work due to disability are living in enforced deprivation, which is quite grinding poverty. We know we have the worst rates of employment of disabled people of any country in the European Union. It is excellent and inspiring to see the Disability Federation of Ireland, the Irish Wheelchair Association and Access for All Ireland working together to put this issue on the agenda and put pressure on the Government. On 9 December, despite a storm, they were outside the Dáil to protest the Government’s cuts. They said then that the Government is forcing them into a choice between heating and eating. They warned that people could be in an absolutely desperate situation and could die as a consequence. Did the Government listen? No. That is why we need to build this movement even further. Disabled people need to be at the centre of that movement, fighting for an affordable Ireland. We need to be on the streets, supporting disabled people and demanding budget measures that do not enrich the already rich and big corporations but, rather, give ordinary people a break. The very minimum of what is needed is to say to the Government to stop its attacks on disabled people and stop forcing disabled people even deeper into poverty. The Government must give an emergency winter payment to combat the hardship disabled people are facing today. After that, we must implement a permanent and decent cost-of-disability support payment, as we have included in our budgets for multiple years in a row. The people cannot wait. That is what the Government is saying to them, however. It tells them to wait until the next budget and not to worry because it will deal with it then. They cannot wait because the cuts have been implemented now and the cost-of-living crisis is now. They need support right now.

Sentiment score: -0.21