Thomas Pringle (Donegal South West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

The Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform, Deputy Howlin said, "What the Irish people have endured has been tough and almost without precedent in the developed world". He says this as if we should be proud of it. Is he proud that children, pensioners, medical card holders, the unemployed, low earners and the self-employed will carry the can? How can people look to the future with confidence, as Deputy Noonan exhorted them to do today? This is a most regressive budget that will make people who are already struggling go below the water line.

The introduction of the property tax ensures it will be resisted by many people. The 0.18% rate is deliberately set low so that when local authorities take over the levying of the tax the real increases will kick in. Coincidently, this will only happen after the local elections in 2014. Does the Government think people will be fooled by this? There are very few exemptions from the property tax. Allowing people on low incomes to defer the tax and slapping an interest rate of 4% on them for doing it will be no comfort to them. Forcing people to build up future debts on the back of the property tax is only building further resentment at the targeting of the weakest in society yet again. The opposition to this tax will be fierce and rightly so. The people of Ireland will, through their opposition, force fairness on the Government. Opposition to the tax is not for the sake of it but is opposition to the strategy that the Government is pursuing of making the weakest sectors in society liable for the debts of the European banking system.

Removing the €127 PRSI exemption is also hard to stomach. A person earning €18,000 a year will pay the same PRSI increase as we Deputies, who earn €92,000. How can a Labour Party Minister justify that? The Fine Gael Party guaranteed no increases in income tax but for low income workers PRSI is a tax on income. How can the Minister say he has not increased taxation?

The Labour Party made much of wanting to increase the universal social charge for those earning over €100,000 per year. They lost that battle to their masters in coalition yet they are happy to take away the PRSI threshold. The Labour Party does not protect the vulnerable; it targets them more and more.

The increase of the self-employed PRSI annual contribution to €500 is a sickening blow for self-employed. They get very little in return for their contribution. I have pushed the Minister for the last two years to allow access to benefits for the self-employed that would offer them support if they need it and would justify increased contributions, but it falls on deaf ears. The Government makes much of the deficit in the Social Insurance Fund as a reason not to provide self-employed people with benefits and these measures are being dressed up as a way to close the deficit. The fact is that the Social Insurance Fund should be in deficit when we are in a recession and built up when we are in recovery. The Government does not see that.

Taxing maternity benefit is hard to believe. It seems like a mean spirited measure. It is targeted to raise €40 million in a full year and makes the children of the country pay once again.

Again and again, we see the vulnerable being hit. The back-to-school clothing allowance, the respite care grant and household packages for the elderly and disabled are being cut. Reducing the respite care grant by €320 will hit families who use this to get some relief for a disabled or elderly family member. We can add to this the cut in child benefit of €10 per month, which is simply lazy. This is another across the board cut. A family on social welfare with three children will lose €30 a month. A family with three children on €100,000 a year will lose €30 a month. Where is the equity in that?

If the Labour Party had the will, a system could have been put in place to have a fairer targeting of cuts in child benefit. I put proposals to the Minister that would have saved €120 million on child benefit but would only target those earning over €80,000 a year. This could have been achieved without a heavy administrative burden on the Department. There are almost 700,000 children in families on low incomes either dependent on social welfare, getting family income supplement or earning under €80,000 per year in this country. The Minister could have protected those children but chose not to.

The 200% increase in the medical card prescription charge once again targets the vulnerable. It is the only part of the health budget that people can be sure will be delivered on. Once again, €51 million is to be taken from the most vulnerable. I have no faith, like the rest of the country, that the Minister will deliver the savings he says he will from the reduction in the costs of prescription drugs. Does anyone in the House really believe that he will achieve €330 million in savings?

The Minister said the budget protects the vulnerable. The budget measures are a litany of attacks on the most vulnerable. There is nothing in the budget that will protect those who need it.

The Fine Gael Party is only interested in balancing the books and does not care what the impact of the changes are, but the Labour Party should care, or should not have told everyone it will protect the vulnerable. The Labour Party has rolled over and has no credibility left. No one will think that Labour are looking after anyone except themselves. That is the sad reality.

Hope for people died when the Government took on the policies of the Fianna Fáil Party in 2011 and ditched its election promises. In the last two budgets the Government has taken ownership of those policies and built on them. It is clear that this is no country for the poor, the vulnerable and those who need to be protected the most.

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