The State's major poverty groups greeted last night's social welfare increases with disappointment. The Society of St Vincent de Paul and the Combat Poverty Agency were concerned at what they saw as low increases for children.
General social welfare rates will rise by £3 a week from June. Old age pensioners will get £6 a week and their spouses £3 a week, where they do not qualify for pensions in their own right.
The Minister, Mr Dermot Ahern, said later he was confident the Government was on target to increase the pension to £100 a week within its term of office. The increases announced yesterday will bring the contributory pension for a person under 80 years of age to £89. The equivalent, means-tested pension for people with insufficient PRSI contributions will be £78.50.
Monthly child benefit will rise by £3 for each of the first two children and £4 for each subsequent child from next September.
The Society of St Vincent de Paul said: "Child benefit rates which equate to less than £1 per week per child are derisory and will in no way impact on child poverty."
Combat Poverty said the increase would "have very little impact on the high cost of rearing children". CPA's director, Mr Hugh Frazer, welcomed the "significant" increase for pensioners but said the lower amount for other social welfare recipients could lead to a two-tiered system which could create "an artificial distinction between the deserving and non-deserving social welfare recipients".
Both CPA and the Society of St Vincent de Paul welcomed the introduction of the tax credit system.
The changes in provision for carers received a mixed welcome from the Carers' Association. Little had been done to ease the means test for carers on low incomes or social welfare, it said. It welcomed the provision of £200 a year towards the cost of respite care - to give the carer a break.
But it was disappointed that neither a non-means-tested carer's benefit nor an extra payment towards the cost of caring had been introduced.
Measures aimed at carers and announced yesterday include extension of eligibility for the Carer's Allowance to about 2,200 parents caring for disabled children and receiving the Domiciliary Care Allowance, to about 500 people caring for family members aged 16 to 65 and needing full-time care and attention and free telephone rental allowance for all qualified carers.
The rule that the carer must live under the same roof as the person being cared for will be relaxed. Exact details of how the new rules will work are not available but it is likely the carer will be expected to live less than a mile from the person they are caring for, it is understood.
A response to a long-running campaign by self-employed people has come in the decision to grant half-pensions to a particular group.
These are people brought into the PRSI scheme when it was applied to self-employed people in 1988 but who, because they were over 56 at the time, were unable to accumulate sufficient PRSI contributions to qualify for a pension.
Mr Ahern said yesterday this group would get 50 per cent of the personal rate of pension so long as they had at least five years' PRSI contributions since April 1988.
Yesterday's Budget also brought a victory to the Office of the Ombudsman which has been pressing for arrears to be paid to pensioners who were late in claiming their old age pensions. Some people put off claiming for years because erroneous information given to them by officials led them to believe they would not qualify.
Now, as many as 5,000 people will paid an average of £2,000 each in arrears. Individual payments will range from as little as £30 to as much as £8,500.
Yesterday's Budget will bring all social welfare rates up to the levels recommended more than 10 years ago by the Commission Social Welfare. Mr Ahern said he was not complacent about this.