Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

This is the budget from hell, particularly for families in the middle income bracket who have two or three children. I want to summarise, particularly for families who may be listening in, what the Minister is expecting them to pay for the banks and all the other mistakes of 12 years of Fianna Fáil misrule. The tables at the back of the Budget Statement include one relating to a couple called Lorraine and Colm. Colm earns €60,000 a year, Lorraine works in the home and the couple has two small children. Colm and Lorraine are not the bankers who turned up their noses at a cap of €600,000 but a couple earning one tenth of that sum. The health levy they and their children pay will rise from €1,200 to €2,400, an increase of €1,200 per annum, while their income levy will increase from €600 to €1,200 per annum, an increase of €600. They will pay an extra €1,800 each year in income and health levies.

That is not the end of it, however, because this couple is special. As Colm's and Lorraine's two children are small, they will lose approximately €1,000 each year through the measures announced on the early child care supplement. Let us suppose they have been married and living together for ten or 15 years. Having bought an apartment when they first got together, they decided when they got married to trade up to a nicer house with bedrooms for the children, as they were told to do by former Taoiseach, Deputy Bertie Ahern, and former Minister for Finance, Mr. Charlie McCreevy. Guess what? Their mortgage interest relief is gone as well, even if they traded up in the past seven years when the market was going up and up and up, spurred on by Fianna Fáil's reckless stoking of the property market.

This budget is really the payback budget because Colm and Lorraine and their cousins, sisters and brothers will have to pay back for what Fianna Fáil has done to this economy over 12 years. They will have to pay back their early childhood supplement. I remember the Minister, Deputy Lenihan, at the time of the last general election and his supporters in Fianna Fáil who, when former Taoiseach, Deputy Bertie Ahern, announced the early childhood supplement, which was a clear bribe to people to vote for Fianna Fáil, went to the post office in Blanchardstown and stood canvassing the queue. I do not know if he remembers it. I remember it because I arrived, saw the Minister and left. He arrived on the day that there was a queue outside the post office where people were waiting to collect child benefit. His people worked all the post office queues to make sure that people knew about this supplement. Will he have a little leaflet for the queues next month to tell them he is taking it away?

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