Joe Higgins (Dublin West, Socialist Party) | Oireachtas source

The €2.5 billion in cuts and increases in tax announced in the budget yesterday must be seen as a further tier built on the platform of savage austerity put in place in this country in the past five years. Budget 2014 is, therefore, a further twist of the austerity knife which is already buried deep in the gut of the working class, low and middle-income workers, pensioners, the unemployed and the youth.

The Fianna Fáil-Green Party Government launched an economic war of attrition against the people at the diktat of the troika to salvage the speculator, the gambling bondholder and the European financial market system from their disastrous foray into the Irish property bubble. Fine Gael and the Labour Party have continued this war for the past two and a half years. Yesterday, like mercenaries on the battlefield, they mugged the dazed survivors of their austerity war, the pensioners, the youth and even young pregnant women, for what little they had left.

In the past week we have been subjected to an Orwellian tide of propaganda from the Government and sections of the billionaire-owned media that the corner has been turned with the economy, that the austerity agenda has worked and that we are now on the cusp of the transformation of this island into a land flowing with milk and honey for the people. This is a cruel fiction coming towards the end of the year when the economy scrapes along the bottom with growth of barely 0.2%, 1,000 young and other workers leaving the country each week, while more than 400,000 are unemployed or underemployed. The €2.5 billion extra will be a further drag on an already sick domestic economy.

Savaging the maternity allowance at a time of great stress for young women is mean in the extreme. The snatching of the telephone allowance from the elderly is absolutely shameful, and threatening to take medical cards from those over 70 years in their tens of thousands is cruel and heartless. The pauperisation of the young unemployed with the savage cut to the jobseeker's allowance is an economic body blow to them, but to attempt to camouflage this cut as an employment-friendly measure insults our intelligence. The attacks on the elderly and the young reflect the brutality of the ongoing austerity agenda promoted by the Fine Gael Government. "Die off," is the callous message to the elderly, "you are an inconvenience." "Get out of the country," is the callous message to the youth, "we have no place for you here because our policies are failing."

For the past two and a half years the Minister for Social Protection, Deputy Joan Burton, has trailed her major unhappiness around the country's media at having the elderly, the unemployed and the poor landed at her feet. She should have been Minister for Finance or Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform announcing the macro cuts, rather than being forced to look her victims in the eye as she snatches a significant portion of maternity allowance and the telephone allowance from the elderly or savages the jobseeker's allowance for the young.

She wanted to carry out the macro cuts and did not want to be seen to be carrying out the savagery involved, although, of course, she signed up for all of this two and a half years ago. For two and a half years, through endless briefings with selected journalists, she has tried to portray herself as a doughty Joan of Arc, battling against those bad men in the Cabinet who would cut her budget and make her look bad and implement the very cuts for which she had signed up. Today, far from being a Joan of Arc, this hapless Minister stands in the same gallery of political rogues as children's milk snatcher, the late Margaret Thatcher, as she puts the bondholder before the pensioner and the banker and the financial market system before the youth of the country. She used the working class of Dublin West to launch her political career in the past 21 years and then betrays them most callously to continue that career.

It is particularly shameful that, in this 100th anniversary year of the 1913 Lock-out, the Labour Party should support the abomination of austerity and this budget. It is a party that was created from the struggles and sacrifices of working class people for justice against the bosses, yet it now lines up with the bosses' system and capitalism against the workers it was supposed to represent. Of course, it is now a party of the right - lock, stock and barrel.

Any budget based on continuing the policy of bailing out banks and bondholders and the paying of odious debt can only result in the continuation of savage austerity. Within the straitjacket of this system, it is simply not possible to meet the needs of the people. Yes, a radical socialist alternative is possible, for which I stand, but that would mean putting the interests of the majority first and bringing the banks and the major resources into public ownership and democratic control. Even allowing for the right-wing nature of the Government, the Socialist Party's budget statement points out that, based on the level of household wealth in this country, a 1% wealth tax on the top 1% would yield €583 million, or an emergency 5% tax on them would yield €2.9 billion. Every increase of 1% in corporation tax would yield €525 million. Repudiation of the odious debt forced on the people would yield many billions. On that basis, massive job creation programmes with public investment in infrastructure and so forth could have been created and begin the process of re-booting and re-making this broken economy. Working class people, the young and the elderly have to stand and fight now. Unfortunately, the trade union leadership which should be giving a lead has been in hiding for the past five years.

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