Willie O'Dea (Limerick City, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

This budget is first and foremost an arithmetical exercise, as all budgets are, designed to bring in a certain amount of tax, spend a certain amount of money and come to a final result at the end of the day. A budget also needs to be more than just an exercise in mathematics, but the problem is that this one is not. A budget needs to be part of an overall strategy and must have a certain strategic element. It must be obvious where it fits into that strategy. I can see no evidence of any overall or coherent strategy in this budget. It lacks direction and is aimless. Quite honestly, I have seen more coherence in a bunch of fireworks. There is no direction or plan involved.

Before the most recent general election, the Labour Party favoured a 50-50 split between tax and expenditure, while Fine Gael's position was 3:1 in favour of expenditure. When both parties got together to write a programme for Government, they compromised on 2:1. I can understand that but in a compromise at that level when budgeting, especially in a time of crisis when one is trying to close a yawning fiscal gap, one must introduce measures that basically pass two tests. First, they will necessarily take money out of the economy, which will reduce activity, but they must also be geared to do minimal damage and create opportunities for the country to begin to grow back to prosperity. The second criterion is that a budget must be fair in order that those with the broadest shoulders take the hardest hit. There is no evidence that this budget has either direction or fairness. This budget is simply a compromise, consisting of a mishmash of measures to which both Government parties, or at least one of them in particular, could be persuaded to sign up, rather than having any coherent strategy.

That is underlined by the much publicised row over the universal social charge. Apparently, the Labour Party's Cabinet members went into various meetings on the basis that they wanted to increase the universal social charge for people earning more than €100,000 per annum. That was also part of our policy proposals. Fine Gael said the only way it would agree to that would be if the Labour Party agreed to let it punish the poor by reducing social welfare. Fine Gael apparently proved to be particularly unyielding on that, so both party leaders had a side meeting and what emerged was something called a mansion tax. What a nonsense.

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