Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin (Cavan-Monaghan, Sinn Fein)

Far from saving the nation this budget is a recipe for worsening recession and deeper depression. The Government of Fianna Fáil and the Green Party has imposed a savage budget that attacks the low and middle income earners, the unemployed and others dependent on social welfare. This budget should have been about job retention and job creation. Instead we have no jobs strategy and an assault on young unemployed people. It does nothing to stimulate the economy. There is no support for the small and medium-sized enterprises which are going to the wall every day. Instead it takes the last euros from the pockets of their customers and condemns them to commercial death.

It is a budget full of deep cuts to public services, especially in child care and education, that will have damaging consequences for years to come. The Government claimed social welfare cuts were largely avoided in this budget, and the Minister said so yesterday, but that is not the case. Jobseeker's allowance for young unemployed people under 20 is to be slashed by half to €100. This is nothing but a savage cut to take money out of the pockets of young unemployed people and it was sickening to hear the Minister, Deputy Lenihan trying to disguise it by saying it was, "to incentivise the young unemployed to participate in training programmes". It is nothing of the sort. It is Government encouragement for some to emigrate and for most to exist on a pittance and to struggle for scarce places in education and training.

The ending of the Christmas social welfare bonus will hit the most vulnerable of families. It is tantamount to cancelling Santa Claus for the children of the poorest families in our society and will force some parents into the hands of moneylenders in order to give their children some semblance of Christmas cheer. Shame on the authors of this proposal and on this Government for adopting such a cruel and heartless measure. Rent supplement for those dependent on private rented accommodation is also being slashed, but there is no corresponding increase in social housing provision. The opposite, in fact, is the case as the budget for social housing is being cut as well.

The halving of the early child care supplement, to be followed by its abolition next year, is also being presented as progressive reform. It is another cut and it is being replaced with the promise, and I stress the promise, of a free early child care and education year for preschool children. Sinn Féin has long argued for direct State provision of child care and investment in child care infrastructure. Now, on the basis of so-called savings, we are seeing a half-baked scheme being introduced, which supposedly is to be up and running in less than nine months. "'Watch this space" is my caution.

There is no doubt Fianna Fáil and the Green Party are reserving the worst of their social welfare cuts for the December budget, or earlier, if it is decided to present it earlier, after they have faced the people in the local and European Parliament elections in June. However, the people are not fools. They know what is coming down the tracks, including an assault on child benefit.

Our public health services, already badly affected by cuts since autumn 2007, are facing nothing short of disaster. However, the Minister for Health, Deputy Mary Harney, like the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland, makes words mean exactly what she, and only she, wants them to mean. She issued a statement yesterday saying her main aim was to maintain services to patients while at the same time services to patients are being reduced or removed altogether. The Government has placed an embargo on the filling of almost all posts in the public health service. In addition, it is expected that contracts for up to 1,400 workers in the health service will not be renewed. This is a recipe for disaster in our public health service.

HSE senior management have indicated they were not consulted prior to the Government's announcement of the embargo on 26 March but are required, nonetheless, to implement the Government decision. The Irish Nurses Organisation and SIPTU have already indicated to the HSE that it will not be possible to run the public health service in the context of the recruitment embargo as announced by Government.

On Monday communities in Clare and North Tipperary had 24 hour accident and emergency cover removed from hospitals in Ennis and Nenagh, placing the regional hospital in Limerick under enormous pressure. Breast cancer services went from the Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda, placing Beaumont Hospital under more pressure. Waiting lists and accident and emergency queues are as bad as ever and will worsen with the major cuts in jobs in the public health service.

Those nurses who are not laid off now face a doubled income levy and health levy, as well as the recently introduced public service pension levy. At the same time, the Minister gave a gold-plated guarantee to the hospital consultants that their €250,000 per annum contract will not be touched. This is for a 33 hour week in the public system and they can still work up to 25% of that time in private practice. The hours are not properly monitored, leaving a question mark over the time spent in the public health system by some consultants and their commitment to it. They, in turn, tarnish the public's view of all practitioners at that level.

I welcome the termination of property-related capital allowance schemes in the health sector covering private hospitals and other private facilities. Where does this leave the Minister's precious private hospital co-location scheme and her other privatisation plans? Though welcome in itself, the ending of this allowance scheme is another piecemeal measure in health policy, while the private for-profit health sector continues to be heavily subsidised by the taxpayer in other ways, such as the consultants' contract and the National Treatment Purchase Fund.

At the start of his budget speech, the Minister said that one of the factors that made us an economic success story was our young, well-educated workforce, yet what has the Government done to education in this budget? It has cut €30 million from the schools building programme. This is on top of the education cuts already introduced - cuts that hit the most vulnerable, such as children with special needs. The cut in the schools building programme is pure folly in terms of education, public spending and, clearly, employment. Children will continue to be taught in overcrowded and sub-standard classrooms. There are 1,400 schools on the schools building waiting list, and it is estimated that 100,000 additional pupils will enter primary school over the next decade. Where will they be accommodated?

Over the past three years, the Government has spent €113 million on rental of school prefabs. The Minister for Education and Science has projected a further spend of €48 million on prefabs for 2009. The annual average cost to the Department for each prefab is €12,500. Thus, the cut in the schools building programme is very bad for the public finances and will cost far more in the long run. It guarantees rental income to companies supplying prefabs, but leaves the schools with deteriorating and eventually useless and worthless units.

The Government should be increasing funding and front-loading the schools building programme as part of a job creation strategy, as proposed by Sinn Féin in our comprehensive employment retention and creation document, Getting Ireland Back to Work, which was forwarded to the relevant Ministers. However, there is no job retention and job creation strategy in this budget. There is nothing to save jobs in large or small enterprises. The scandals of SR Technics and Waterford Crystal will long haunt a grossly negligent Government which, despite all the warnings over recent years, has allowed highly skilled workforces to be lost to this economy and thrown on the unemployment scrapheap.

Beyond the high-profile job losses with hundreds of workers losing their jobs at a time, there is another and equally tragic reality in the Ireland of 2009. In cities, towns and villages across this country every night the lights are going out for the last time on small retail outlets, manufacturers and suppliers of services. This budget has done nothing to assist small and medium-sized enterprises. Worse than that, it will compound their plight and force more of them out of business.

Considering all the elements of the budget announced yesterday by the Minister for Finance, the question must be: who will be able to spend now? The budget takes more money in levies out of the pockets of people on low to middle incomes. Not only will they have less to spend on goods and services, but many of them will have nothing to spend on anything, full stop. Struggling retailers and service suppliers will lose more business and be forced to close. That is the inevitable consequence of the flawed thinking behind this supplementary budget. The Government will devastate local and regional economies. Village communities and small towns across the State are finding their local economies driven back to the dreary and dreadful days of the 1970s. People are angry and have been angry for months, but they are now also afraid. That is what one sees, in tandem with their anger: a fear for their future and the future of their children. It is tangible and real and is out there as never before.

Deputy Mary White of the Green Party said, as was mentioned here earlier, that the budget had Green fingerprints all over it. Like other speakers, I am glad to see she has admitted it. The Green Party must, therefore, accept full responsibility for the drastic cuts in public transport, social housing and water services. For the Green Party, no less than for Fianna Fáil, it is a case of "blame the people and make them pay". The Minister, outrageously, even blamed the people for contributing to the recession by rejecting the Lisbon treaty, something which has nothing whatsoever to do with the economic crisis - "opportunism, how are you?" It was a very telling statement on the Minister's part. He presented the verdict of the people as a rejection of the European Union, which, of course, it was not. He claimed it showed that economic success had "fostered a false sense of invincibility". In other words, we acted above our station in life by daring to reject the Lisbon treaty.

That type of thinking is the product of a national inferiority complex on the part of the ruling elite in this State, a mentality which I and many others thought had been thrown in the dustbin of history. However, this cringe-making - for that is what it is - Fianna Fáil-Green Party Government feels compelled to apologise to the world for the decision of the Irish people. Does this coalition not realise that the people of Europe would have more respect for us if we had a Government that stood by the democratic decision of its people and moved forward on that basis?

In concluding his budget speech, the Minister referred to "our short history as a nation", which took some analysis. It is the first time I ever heard the history of the Irish nation described as short. I can only conclude that the Minister was referring to the short history of this State. How dare he equate the two?

One thing is certain - the Government has a wilfully short and selective memory, which recognises no bad decisions on its part, no bad policies, no mistakes, no apologies and no regrets. It can apologise to Brussels and Strasbourg but it cannot acknowledge to its own people that the Fianna Fáil-led Governments of the past 12 years are even partly responsible for the recession we now face. There was in the Minister's speech a grudging recognition that the property bubble was a contributory factor in this recession, but that was as far as it went. There was no acknowledgement that the policies of Fianna Fáil-led Governments deliberately inflated that property bubble. They knowingly shaped housing policy, development policy and tax policy to inflate the bubble and gain short-term revenue from escalating property prices through stamp duties. They deliberately decided not to reform our tax system, not to make the wealthy pay more tax and not to create a more equitable and sustainable economy and a fairer society.

However, Fianna Fáil Members are, and always have been, very wily politicians. The Minister began his budget speech by outlining the measures to reduce payments to Oireachtas Members. I welcome these reductions, even though they are essentially a hosing down exercise designed to take some of the political heat off this Administration. The Taoiseach too was very clever in his strategy of getting all 20 Ministers of State to resign before appointing a reduced complement of 15 after the budget. He will keep them on board, get the budget measures through, keep them sweating and then make his selection. It is a great pity that wily Fianna Fáil Ministers did not put as much careful thinking and strategy into governing this State as they put into managing their majority and looking after their own Deputies, Senators, councillors, party members and friends. By heaven, they were well looked after in the Celtic tiger years. The Galway tent is gone but the memory lingers on.

This budget creates a new twist in the incredible story of Fianna Fáil and its property developer and banking friends. This is the triumvirate that brought down the economy. Nobody should be in any doubt about that. Their greed created and sustained the property bubble. They used the short-term and unsustainable revenues from that bubble to allow the Government to avoid taxing the wealthy. They encouraged a mania for property investment based on easy credit. The banking chiefs were a key part of the conspiracy, doling out the loans, raking in the profits and rewarding themselves massive salaries and bonuses. However, the profits were as unsustainable as the revenues. The result was the banking collapse.

Now the Government intends to make ordinary people take on the toxic loans of the banks. Yet again, it all comes back to taxpayers, who face a massive risk, in addition to the bank guarantee, courtesy of the Government. As a result of the mess created by politicians, developers and bankers, the livelihoods of low to middle-income working people and those on social welfare are being savagely attacked, with worse yet to come. Even after the fall in property prices, there are still tens of thousands of people on local authority housing waiting lists.

The Minister for Finance observed yesterday that while some commentators had warned that the housing market was unsustainable, many others did not. We in Sinn Féin stand on our record in that regard. In November 2003, at the Construction Industry Federation conference, the then Minister for Finance, Mr. Charlie McCreevy, sought advice from the assembled developers and property speculators on housing policy. I stated at the time that the Government, in tandem with the same developers and property speculators, was directly responsible for the spiralling price of houses. It was at the behest of the Construction Industry Federation that the Government gutted section V of the Planning Act 2000 which required 20% of new developments to consist of social and affordable housing. The housing policy of the Fianna Fáil-Progressive Democrats Governments was totally market-driven. As a result, we had, and still have, massive local authority waiting lists. At the height of the bubble, people on above average incomes could not afford a home. Between 1998 and 2003, the price of a new house in the State rose on average by 177%.

Despite the changed circumstances, nothing has changed in terms of policy. The slashing of funding for the provision of social housing by local authorities shows that the Government has learned nothing. It has not learned the most basic lesson of all, that the real value of a home is the shelter it provides, the security it offers and the anchorage and stability it brings to the lives of all who live in it. The Government has not learned that the best investment is in people, not property, in the real economy of production and jobs and not in the unreal world of speculation and the casino of the stock market.

It need not have been this way. We in Sinn Féin were among those who proposed, year after year, alternative and fairer ways to create and share wealth. That must still be done. However, because of the disastrous governance of Fianna Fáil-led Administrations, it will be much more difficult. Nevertheless, even the longest journey must begin with a first step. That first step must be the removal of this Fianna Fáil-led Government.

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