The Taoiseach said that "welfare cheats cheat us all" in a campaign now universally recognised as having been based on false figures which his own Department questioned. He cynically used public money to enhance his appeal to Fine Gael members. That campaign may now be largely forgotten but the agenda behind it remains. It was more than just a dog whistle campaign for votes. It was part of an ideological assault on social welfare. Under the guise of labour activation measures pushed by Fine Gael and Labour, unemployed people have been demonised, victimised and have had their social welfare cut, all in the service of constructing a republic of precarity which drives people into the kind of low-paid precarious work which has become widespread. One in four workers is now in part-time employment, 30% of workers are low-paid and 8% of workers have hours which change from week to week or from month to month. The result is a completely lack of stability and security and people being unable to plan their lives. They are existing instead of living.

The counterpart to that precarious employment is precarious unemployment in the JobPath machine. Some 140,000 unemployed people have been turned into opportunities for profit for private companies. In the process and without significant debate, the provision of social welfare has been partially privatised. I have spoken to a number of people who have been through JobPath. They say that they are not given any real training and they are just supervised while looking for jobs on a computer, which means that it is pointless travel for many. They describe it as demeaning, patronising and infantilising. The threat of having their social welfare cut by more than €40 hangs over all of their interactions with these private companies, which would leave people trying to survive on €150 or less a week.

Since JobPath was introduced, the number of people who have had these so-called penalty rates applied has increased from 5,000 in 2015 to 16,000 last year. That is in one year alone. Some 6,500 JobPath participants have had their dole cut. On the other hand, €84 million of public money has been paid to just two companies, SeeTec and Turas Nua. They get money each time someone signs a personal progression plan and they get paid job sustainment fees. Both SeeTec and Working Links, which is one of two companies behind Turas Nua, have been accused of fraud in the operation of similar schemes in Britain. Last October in the Dáil, Deputy Catherine Murphy raised a very serious case of fraud by SeeTec in Ireland.

All of that has been justified up until now on the false basis that the system works and gets people into employment. That has now been completely exposed by the Government's own figures which came out three weeks ago. Only 18% of those who engage in JobPath end up in full-time employment. Some €84 million has been given to these private companies to get people jobs which they would have got themselves. Will the Taoiseach now read the writing on the wall for JobPath? Will he agree that the scheme needs to be scrapped and that instead of handing money over to private companies, he should invest in proper education and training and in real jobs for unemployed people?

Welfare fraud is very real. It is a real problem in this country and in every western society. Even if we take the lowest estimate of the scale of welfare fraud in this country, it is about €40 million a year. That is a lot of money in my view. Let us not forget that people who engage in welfare fraud are not the poor and vulnerable. They are people who are pretending to be poor and vulnerable. They are people who are working and claiming.

What about these companies?

They are people who are working, not paying their taxes on that work, and also claiming welfare at the same time. I do not believe that is defensible or acceptable. There are people who are pretending to have a disability they do not have or pretending to care for someone for whom they are not caring. People are claiming to be somebody they are not to claim pensions for people who are long dead. It really disappoints me to hear left-wing politicians in this country constantly defending fraudsters as though they are entitled to the benefits that they are stealing. They are not.

Fine Gael was the party that was caught out.

It is absolutely the work of this Government-----

Turas Nua is a sham.

-----to prevent and crack down on welfare fraud in any way we can. One only needs to look at the court reports every other day to see the detail of some of those cases and what people have been doing to defraud our system. The reason we cracked down on welfare fraud is not ideological. The reason is that fraud is wrong, whether it is tax fraud or welfare fraud, and we act against it. In doing so, we ensure that the welfare budget is protected for those who are entitled to it, including our pensioners, people with disabilities, carers, the unemployed, lone parents, blind people, widows and others. As a result we have been able to increase in two budgets in a row the State pension, payments to carers, payments to people with disabilities and payments to people who are unemployed. It is Government policy to crack down on welfare fraud in order to protect the welfare budget for those who need and deserve it, particularly pensioners, the disabled, carers and people who are unemployed.

And to be nice to the bankers.

I am very disappointed to hear politicians on the left continuously equivocating on this issue and not condemning welfare fraud. I note that the Deputy did not do so on this occasion. Tackling unemployment is one of the areas in which everyone acknowledges we have seen a real turnaround in recent years. Unemployment peaked at 15% and is now down at approximately 6%. Long-term unemployment is down to 3%. That is not just because of a recovering economy. Unlike many recoveries, we saw unemployment fall rapidly once our recovery started. That is not the norm in recoveries. There is usually a lag. The reason unemployment fell very rapidly in Ireland once the recovery started is the kind of active policies in which the Government engaged both on the enterprise and welfare sides. Had we listened to the Deputy and had we pursued the policies which he advocated, which have been attempted in Greece, Zimbabwe, Venezuela and other countries, not only would we have mass unemployment, but we would have a mass refugee exodus from this country similar to the current exodus from Venezuela to Colombia.