Minister for Social Protection Joan Burton said it was important to change the culture relating to work here. She said she wanted everybody to become a persuader and help anyone they knew was not working to return to work.

“While we want to have a good social welfare system, we also want people in their working years to be in employment, including self-employment,’’ she said.

“All sorts of models are developing which offer a range of opportunities, particularly to younger people.’’

At the resumed budget debate, Ms Burton said the Pathways to Work strategy had helped ensure a reduction in unemployment from its crisis peak of 15.1 per cent to its current rate of 11.1 per cent.

“Having a job is the best single protection against poverty, the best path to a better and independent future for individuals and families and the best way to reduce expenditure on social welfare,’’ she said.

Job matching

Ms Burton said that if those wishing to return to work were matched with the employers who were beginning to hire, the removal of a significant number of people from the live register would be achieved.

Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin said the budget had no social or economic vision, purely a political one of electoral survival. "The most leaked and most spun budget in Irish history contained no objective other than trying to dig the Government out of its current deep hole," he said. "It included a collection of measures designed to try to take the edge off many of the worst decisions of the past three years.''

Mr Martin said the Government had been deeply regressive in its actions since taking office.

"By making budgets more unfair, refusing to be more responsive and focusing on headlines rather than the long-term, Fine Gael and Labour have directly worsened the two-tier recovery,'' he said. Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams said the Government had the ability to get rid of the water charges and the family home tax and to take the remaining 210,000 lowest paid workers out of the tax net, but it had decided not to do this.

‘No fairness’

“Instead of giving more to those who have less, the Government gives more to those who have more and less to those who have less,’’ he said. “There is no equality, no inclusivity and no fairness.’’

Mr Adams said it was possible to measure the standards of a society by the way it treated the disadvantaged, the poor, senior citizens, children and citizens with disabilities. Most people, he said, responded positively to positive leadership.

“This is the same in terms of getting the economy moving forward and dealing with the debt,’’ he said. “The problem thinking people have is the absence of any notion or degree of fairness or equality in the approach adopted by this and the previous Fianna Fáil-led government and the huge gap between the rhetoric and the substance of what they do.’’

Mr Adams said that since 2011, Fine Gael and Labour had attacked the welfare of citizens from the cradle to the grave as they demolished the most basic social protections.