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

I am sorry His Whipness is not here to hear me say that we will support this measure because it is a marginally progressive move. It is a gesture or token towards being progressive and dealing with gross inequalities of wealth and income without any serious substance in the budget towards addressing these inequalities. I cannot say it better than Deputy Shortall because she hit the nail on the head. This is a token to make it look as if the budget is trying to be fair without dealing with the substantial issues.

The Government has hammered working families. The more I look at the detail of this, the worse it gets. The larger family, the more it is hammered, which will hit working-class families particularly hard. They will take some time to work out how large the hit is but they will be counting the cost for a long time. As has been said, there were potential savings and choices in respect of pension tax relief. Hundreds of millions of euro could have been saved that are spent on reliefs that benefit the wealthiest in society. It is fairly incomprehensible that the Government did not choose those options instead of the ones it did choose. One would have to speculate that it is either because the people making the decisions benefit from the current regime or it is a capitulation by the Labour Party to the Fine Gael agenda. Either way, it is deplorable, given what is being done to people who are hanging on by their fingernails.

We will support the measure. There are one or two measures further down that one would support but they are so marginal and fail to deal with these inequalities. It is unbelievable. Perhaps the Government would not have opted for as radical or, as some people might say, aggressive measures on taxing wealth and profits as some on this side of the House have proposed but it could have gone a hell of a lot further in dealing with those inequalities. Every step further it could have gone would have given relief to the people it has hit. That is not just a terrible wasted opportunity. It will continue the suffering for many and the understandable bitterness, anger and frustration of ordinary people who are the victims at the bottom of society and have yet again been hammered.

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