Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)

As is traditional in the worst of Irish politics, the Government tried to be clever with the budget. There may have been a few smug smiles as the Minister announced tokens to make the budget look as if it was fairer, but they were just tokens, or tricks of the eye.

The budget, as announced yesterday and today, is cruel and stupid. The Government made a cold and calculated decision to attack the poor, the young, the vulnerable and struggling families to protect bankers and the super-wealthy. It is as simple and as obscene as that.

It is immoral that any Government would choose to attack children, schools, young people, students, lone parents, the disabled and families dependent on rent allowance. If one were to put together a comprehensive list of the most vulnerable sectors of society to attack them, one could not do a more shameful and vindictive job than the Government has done in this budget.

To hit the allowances of young disabled people is obscene. To hit the elderly and the poor who depend on the fuel allowance will mean the difference between life and death for some of those people this winter. That is not rhetoric, as the Minister knows. There were nearly 2,000 winter-related deaths among the elderly last year. The cut in the fuel allowance means more people will die. To cut the capitation grant for schools by 6% between now and 2015 is shameful when we hear pious words about children being our future and investing in education. To hit lone parents, when every study shows that lone parents in our society suffer disproportionately from poverty, is shameful. The change in the income disregard makes a mockery of the Government's claim to want to incentivise work. It is a direct disincentive to lone parents to work and another measure which will drive children into poverty, when child poverty is rising.

To hit rent allowance is a headline social welfare cut, despite all the Government assertions that it is not hitting headline social welfare payments. For 96,000 people in receipt of rent allowance, most of whom have lost their jobs through no fault of their own, that is a nasty regressive cut which will drive more people into poverty. To hit students with higher registration fees and to cut grants makes a mockery of all the talk about a knowledge economy. Hundreds, if not thousands, of students from less well-off and struggling families will be forced out of third level education as a result of that. To hit back-to-school clothing and footwear allowances and back-to-education allowances means hitting the poor and the vulnerable.

Let us not forget about the slaughter of jobs. The Government slogan was "jobs and fairness", but one of the few concrete measures in the jobs area is to ratchet up the massacre of public sector jobs. Fianna Fáil said 17,000 jobs would go in the public sector. That was bad enough. The programme for Government promised that 25,000 jobs would be cut. Another trick has been played, the two figures have been added together and the figure will now be 37,000. That will mean a collapse of vital services. Already, 6,000 people have gone from the health services and another 7,000 will go by 2015. It is dishonest for a Government to pretend there is not a direct relationship between the agenda of cutting jobs and the closure of accident and emergency units, public nursing homes and local hospital services.

It is outrageous but not surprising that Fine Gael would mount such an attack on the poor, the vulnerable, working people and public services, but it is beyond belief that the Labour Party would put its name to such cruel and senseless measures as these. Out of a total of €1.4 billion in spending cuts announced by the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform yesterday, €811 million were directed at the poor and the vulnerable. Do Labour Party Deputies, and the Labour Party Minister who is in the Chamber, believe they would have been elected and be sitting here now if they had told the people before the election that they were contemplating such vicious measures directed at the disabled, the young, lone parents and poor families? They know they would not. They posed as champions of the less well-off, got their votes on that basis and, in double quick time, stabbed the people who voted for them in the backs. They should be ashamed of themselves.

Having savaged the poor and vulnerable with cuts yesterday, we moved today to another round of unjust and senseless attacks in the form of regressive taxes and charges. The bulk of what the Government proposed today, notwithstanding a few tokens, are taxes on ordinary working people which will further hit their incomes. The household charge will raise €160 million, VAT increases of €500 million and excise duties of €178 million. The bulk of this revenue will come from ordinary families.

The household charge, a poll tax, is a regressive stealth charge. It is shameful and more of the same stuff. Our taxation system is one that says it is acceptable for people on low and middle incomes to pay the same as multimillionaires. Is that right, is it just or is it about equality? It is not. It is part of an agenda that will lead to the increase of those charges and the introduction of water charges in the coming years.

The increases in VAT are stupid and regressive. They will depress demand further and put more pressure on the tens of thousands of small businesses who are hanging on for dear life and trying to stay in business. The increased VAT will further depress demand and mean that poor families with limited and declining incomes will buy less in the shops. Not only is it unfair and unjust, it probably will not raise one single cent. The Government can increase VAT and hope to raise extra revenue when an economy is growing, but when it is declining and incomes are contracting, people spend less. Therefore, the Government will get nothing back from this measure which will just hit at the poor.

The proposed changes in motor tax make a mockery of all previous assertions about incentivising people in seeking to have a low carbon economy. They increase motor tax for people who accepted the word of previous Governments that they were serious about moving to a low carbon economy. The Government is now ratcheting up these taxes again. The increase in the carbon tax means increases in the price of oil and gas for home heating for the poor and less well-off, which following the fuel allowance cuts will lead to more winter deaths and greater suffering for the elderly, the least well-off and the vulnerable in society. It is pathetic that the Government has tried to gloss over this by saying this will not happen until May next year; therefore, we will not have more deaths this winter but will have more at the end of 2012 and 2013.

When the Government is faced with such criticism from this side of the House, it wrings its hands and states it does not like this any more than we do and that it wishes it did not have to do it. It states it hurts it as much as it hurts us, but that it has no choice and that there is no alternative. Of course, there are alternatives. There are choices, as the Government knows well. Next year and for the following ten years some €3 billion will be paid into the toxic casino bank that is Anglo Irish Bank. An estimated €10 billion will be paid in interest repayments next year on the debts run up by developers, bankers and bondholders. These are the same developers that the Government, via NAMA, is paying €200,000 a year or to whom it is paying hundreds of millions to lease properties such as the National Convention Centre or the NTMA building, or they are the bankrupt landlords and developers to whom it plans to pay more public money to lease their properties and put them back in business, or they are the poor banking executives who must survive on a meagre salary of €500,000 a year. These same bank executives preside over banks that are stuffed with public money but which continue to starve the economy of the credit it needs and continue to screw mortgage holders to the wall.

There are alternatives, but the Government chooses not to take them. It should stop paying off the bondholders and propping up toxic casino banks, whether in Ireland or elsewhere in Europe. It should cancel the debt, as it is not ours. However, it states that if it does this, there will be no money in ATMs because the European Union will cut us loose. Perhaps the Taoiseach and the Minister have not noticed that the Union is in bits and that its strategy is failing. Even its beloved markets no longer believe it and they are downgrading it and the likelihood of it being able to pay off its debts. They can see what anybody can see, that austerity is crippling the European economy, which means that growth projections for this economy and across Europe are falling. This means we cannot pay back the debts. Why, therefore, do we slavishly submit to the diktats of the markets and the troika?

There is a simple alternative, namely, to tax the wealthy, but this is something the Government resolutely refuses to do. As we set out in our pre-budget submission, the CSO - perhaps the Government will rubbish its figures also - has stated the top 5% of the population has €220 billion in personal wealth. We suggest the Government should take just €10 billion from them. This is an emergency. If everybody else can be attacked in it, why can we not just impose a 5% wealth tax on the people in question? We propose a 50% tax on all incomes over €100,000, a 60% tax on incomes over €150,000 and a 70% tax on incomes over €200,000. The Government's figures which we believe are conservative indicate this would raise €1.1 billion. Why do we not take the properties from the bankrupt NAMA developers and put them in the hands of local authorities and begin a major social housing construction programme in order that we would no longer pay out €500 million a year in rent supplements to private landlords? In turn, that would generate approximately €300 million or €400 million in rental revenue. That action alone which could be accomplished in one year would save €750 million for the State.

The choice the Government has made is to protect the rich and attack the vulnerable in society. We say there is an alternative, but it seems that when governments fail, it takes people power of the sort seen in Greece, Portugal and elsewhere to bring that alternative to pass.

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