Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

Today's performance by the Minister for Finance has really been like a Hallowe'en B movie. For Fianna Fáil, it is really "Nightmare on Merrion Street" with mood music from the shower scene in "Psycho".

This is a tough budget for middle-income and working families, just like the Government promised. Middle-class and working families have not just taken a hit, they have been mugged by the Minister. Whether we are referring to the income levy or the restriction in terms of health costs, we should make no mistake about the fact that the coping classes, the PAYE sector, are the Minister's main targets today. While this budget will eat into the income of the average PAYE family, the ultra-wealthy, the tax exiles and those who made a killing from the Celtic tiger will suffer relatively little pain. I noted how the Minister thought about them when he introduced the levy of €10 for people leaving the country but I noticed how he managed to exempt those friends of Fianna Fáil with private jets. The levy does not apply to craft that carry fewer than 20 passengers. If the girls want a weekend in New York, as people got used to in the Celtic tiger years, and want to avoid paying the €10, they had better talk to a friend with a private aircraft.

The budget reeks of panic measures. The Minister lacks a clear and coherent strategy for economic recovery in the medium term. I worry about the quality of the figures in the budget. No fewer than three very reputable commentators and economic firms indicated the Minister is overestimating the tax take for next year by up to €3 billion. His plan is very limited and very reminiscent of the Haughey budgets of the early 1980s, during which era there was a broad indication that line Ministers would reduce costs by specific targets. However, it never really happened. It was not until Ray MacSharry became Minister for Finance some years later that there was real implementation of cutbacks in regard to targeted spending.

The Minister should have delivered a recovery plan to put the 80,000 unemployed back to work, training or education. On page B.15 of the Budget Statement, the Minister indicates eight very severe restrictions to entitlement to welfare payments. This will mean that many people, who through no fault of their own are losing their jobs in the current economic climate, will be subject to many more restrictions and will have to wait many more weeks to receive a benefit. When they receive it, their qualification period will be reduced.

There is nothing in the budget to get the 80,000 on the dole back to work, education and training. When I was in the Department of Social Welfare with the Minister's former ministerial colleague, Deputy Michael Woods, I introduced the back-to-work allowance and a series of other measures to get people off social welfare and back into employment. This budget contains no such positive measures.

What a bonfire of the vanities we have witnessed today. Very little has been spared. Into the bonfire goes the national development plan and many of our most ambitious plans for a proper transport system. There is no mention of metro north, metro west or a train to Navan, but the roads programme has been kept.

Into the bonfire goes the Fianna Fáil manifesto and all it promised. Into the bonfire goes most of Fianna Fáil's commitments to a fair society and social justice. One of the monuments to children and women that the Celtic tiger should have built — because we worked for it — was a proper child care and pre-school education system. Instead, the Minister indicated that he really intends, in future budgets while the recession continues, to take the axe to child care and child benefit. This represents a bad day for many women in Ireland, be they full-time carers of children in the home or working outside the home and trying to mix work with child care. We should have built a pre-education and pre-school system because all of our competitors in Europe, whom we aspire to be like, have one. We had the money during the boom but did not build it.

The Government has driven the economy into the ditch. Today we have the first full view of the wreckage and our first full opportunity to estimate the cost of the repair. Believe me, the wreckage is not a pretty sight and the repair bill will leave every taxpayer gasping. No doubt Ministers will congratulate themselves on their tough-love approach. However, will the Taoiseach be able to look in the eye a family whose livelihood has been destroyed by his economic mismanagement and say to it, in the style of Bill Clinton, "I feel your pain"? Like hell he will. Those on the Government benches will feel very little pain over the measures announced today; they are too well cushioned for that.

The levy the Minister introduced will mean extra income tax of €500 or €600 for those earning €50,000 or €60,000 per annum. Such a family does not merit a doctor-only medical card or a full one but many such families must often pay for treatment for really serious medical conditions. If they want to go to an accident and emergency unit, they must now pay €100, an increase from €66. If they must pay privately for a fast operation to save the life of an elderly parent in the absence of a medical card, as many now do to avoid queues, they will find the tax refund to which they were entitled heretofore has been reduced to 20%. I ask the Minister to rethink this before the introduction of the Finance Bill.

There are many well-documented cases of families taking second mortgages on houses to pay for expensive private medical care because it is not otherwise available or because, for one reason or another, their health insurance coverage or that of their parents is not intact. They will take a very heavy hit in today's budget. The Minister has not thought through the consequences of this for the complex arrangements families make to support themselves and their loved ones when their private medical insurance does not cover them or when their only option is to go to a private institution not included in their insurance plan. For years, we have heard talk about soft and hard landings. The Taoiseach assured us time and again that we would have a soft landing. The Minister, Deputy Brian Lenihan, is the Taoiseach's trusted pilot but the Minister does not know the territory and he is carrying tonnes of excess baggage. There is a heavy fog, it is pitch dark outside and he has not a clue where to make a landing, either hard or soft.

This is a budget that compounds the conditions it was meant to address. It does nothing to stem the haemorrhage of jobs, it abandons a long-held policy of having little or no borrowing for current spending and it puts important capital projects like public transport on the long finger at the time we should be preparing the country to take advantage of any recovery. Everywhere we look, the economic news is troubling. While it took Ministers a long time to come to terms with that cold reality, for many of our people it is not really news. They have been paying the price for months, even if the Taoiseach failed to notice.

Some 80,000 workers have lost their jobs this year, the largest annual increase ever recorded. Official records show that there are 110,000 children living in poverty. It has never been more difficult to save or to retire and thousands of pensioners have to choose between food and fuel because the rising price of both is not matched by either their pension or their fuel allowance. I welcome the increase of €2 in the fuel allowance, which is great.

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