Pearse Doherty (Donegal South West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I move amendment No. 54:

In page 36, between lines 11 and 12, to insert the following:“20. The Minister shall within 3 months of the passing of this Act prepare and lay before Dáil Éireann an analysis of the tax increases in this Act, and the total of tax increases and spending cuts of Budget 2014, setting out the continuing impact on people based on their gender, income, age, marital and disability status.”.

Earlier this year, my party produced legislation which provided for equality budgeting and voted on it in the Dáil. Fine Gael and the Labour Party voted against this legislation because the Government has failed consistently to undertake independent assessments on its two budgets’ impacts on people’s incomes or on groups already disadvantaged. This is all about having an evidence-based attempt to understand the distributional and equality impact of the Government’s policy on real people.

During the debate on our legislation, it was suggested the Government was committed to equality budgeting. I recall on the Finance Bill 2013, the Minister claimed it was more a task for the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform but I believe it is a job for both. Measures dealing with single fathers, private health insurance, for example, would be part of the assessment. While I know the Minister will not budge on this, the Government did give a commitment that it was in favour of introducing some type of equality budgeting. I believe we will be forced to do it anyway by Europe.

We should be taking a lead rather than being dragged kicking and screaming into this domain. I have moved this amendment to raise the issue again and put it on the record. We in Sinn Féin are very committed to it and I do not think we should have anything to fear by saying this is the impact it will have on these sections of society. For two years in a row, the ESRI has confirmed that the Labour-Fine Gael Government budgets take more from low-income groups than they do from high-income groups. If we had independent equality assessments looking at, for example, how it affected women or people with disabilities, it would also show that there has been a disproportionate impact on these groups.

This Government has always relied on the fact that when one takes all of the budgets together, including the ones that Fianna Fáil introduced, they are progressive and all the rest but it cannot hide behind the fact that the ESRI has said twice in a row that it has taken proportionally more from low-income groups than high-income groups. There is a need for it. Again, it is putting down a marker that this issue will not go away. We hope to see some progress on it this year 12 months on.