Jack Wall (Kildare South, Labour)

One wonders what we will say about this budget when we talk about it in the future. My constituents will remember it as a budget of fear, of the future and the unknown. Some old age pensioners even fear for their lives because the Minister for Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs has stopped the grant for safety mechanisms for older people. This grant was in its infancy and for many it was a way to ensure a safe home and a safer community and helped them to live out their lives in a happy state. In the first year 10,000 people got the grant and 11,000 in the second year. I do not blame the Minister of State at the Department, Deputy Curran, because he is new to the game but I do blame his line Minister, Deputy Éamon Ó Cuív.

This type of grant improves community life. It is imperative that we examine community life. This has to move beyond a house on an estate, on a street or even a rural house. We must ensure that we provide a sense of care for and attention to these people and show that safety in their own homes is important. The Minister has cut this small sum of money at source and says that he will review the applications in situ and deal with them, depending on the funding available. We know that none of those grants will be paid in the present environment.

That the Government says this budget is fair makes one wonder about the caring society. I can see no logic in the Minister's cutting this grant to senior citizens. There is no care, attention or fairness in that because it puts fear into these people. Everyone in this House could quote examples from their areas of people whose lives have been threatened or who have been intimidated and so on but the best the Minister could do to reduce his budget was to cut this grant.

Time and again in this House on budget day when the Minister for Finance spoke about taking people out of the tax net those on the Government benches exulted. It gave people an expectation of their income and they planned a future for themselves and their children on that basis. They looked for joint ownership loans because they were going to provide the ultimate, a house for their families but then greed took over as developers increased the costs of the houses so that joint ownership became a joke. The Government did nothing about that, apart from allowing the banks and lending agencies to issue 100% loans. We have seen what happened due to the lack of control in that area.

Everyone here has met people who say how hard it is to deal with these lending agencies where the interest increased by 3% or 4% almost weekly due to failure to pay. Those homes are under threat. Now the Government is saying that everyone must pay but it will not accept that it created that expectation when it took people out of the tax net. They built their hopes for the future on that expectation.

The Government is further increasing those people's problems because it is doing away with the mortgage relief scheme and increasing the insurance on their mortgages so it is hitting them at every possible point. That is what young couples who contact me are worried about.

I went to talk to some of the civil servants who were on strike recently and they told me about their problems arising from decentralisation and the cost of child care etc. Those problems will increase by thousands of euro. That is where fairness comes in. The Government can ask what the Labour Party has to offer, but when we tried to offer something and come forward with proposals, we were met with a closed door at the Department of Finance on Merrion Street. We received a note from the Department asking us not to contact it any more because it was preparing a budget. That is the assistance we got in trying to put our case forward, so the Government should not come the heavy with us and say we had nothing to propose, because we did not get the necessary help. Every Minister has ten or 12 people in their offices to do this while we have one or two. We cannot compare. When we sought parity we were refused. Maybe we were getting too close to resolving some of the problems. There was no credit in this budget, but the Government was not going to allow us any.

The last budget irked me to despair when I saw the clawback on the rent subsidy. That has hit again. I ask the Minister to look at that and the mortgage interest relief, which would make life somewhat easier for those who are unfortunate enough to be in that position.

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