Dessie Ellis (Dublin North West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

This budget will directly contribute to homelessness. The Minister's recent launching of an initiative to end homelessness was farcical and nothing but a PR stunt. The budget continues the slashing of the housing budget, which has been cut by over €1 billion since 2008. Most spectacularly, it continues the Government's practice of attempting to spin a hit as a gift. This summer, when the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government announced it would cut less than had been planned in budget 2013, it heralded this as a boost in funding. The budget has been cut by many times this supposed boost. The Department even claimed that it would specifically help the disabled and the elderly shortly before Dublin City Council announced that its adaptation grant scheme was to close early due to funding running out following a 40% cut.

This Government is fond of moving figures around, redesignating funds from one place to another and claiming boosts left, right and centre. It has no time for being honest, properly funding housing or upholding the right of the people to adequate housing. Some €30 million has been promised for social housing in this budget, but €58 million has been cut from the housing budget. This much-prized €30 million will deliver, it is hoped, 500 homes. In the context of 112,000 people on the housing waiting list and a further 5,000 people in homelessness, every little helps, but this is minuscule. It is also hard to take seriously when the Government has been promising thousands of NAMA homes since 2011, with fewer than 500 delivered. No doubt we will have some restating of this promise over the course of 2014 in the hope that we have all forgotten and think this is something new. This is before we even consider the fact that these homes remain in the ownership of the developers bailed out by the public purse. They will be paid handsomely for the use of their properties and will have them returned in a few years refurbished at public expense. This failure to address housing is likely to continue the growth in homelessness seen in recent years, but the cut to rent supplement will, as shown in 2012, put people out of their homes. This is taking from those who have nothing to give.

Rent supplement is a poverty trap. The Minister, Deputy Burton, admitted this. Rent supplement recipients are in poverty, yet the Government expects couples on rent supplement to fork out another €5 a week, €260 a year. It expects them to do this while their landlords are trying to raise their rent and even taking extra payments under the table. They are expected to do this as they are already being pressured by the State to get their rents lowered, even as rents all around them go up, in part because the Government is intent on spending more than €500 million subsidising private landlords and less and less on providing affordable, secure housing.

The cut to young people on the dole will also put many people, especially vulnerable young people who have been in care or similar circumstances, in a very precarious situation. Focus Ireland proposed a pathway last year to help young people affected by similar cuts already in place. Nothing has been done on this. This Government does not care about housing people. It cares about meeting targets that the EU and IMF set so that in a year's time it can set its own targets and finally have the opportunity to initiate its own very Irish version of right-wing, anti-worker, pro-privatisation Reaganomics.

The Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport mentioned Smarter Travel in his contribution. The only thing smart about this Government's approach to transport is from the perspective of those who wish to profit from the public need for a transport system. There is nothing smart about allowing private operators to cherry-pick from public service obligation, PSO, routes currently served by Bus Éireann or Dublin Bus. There is nothing smart about making public service compete with private profit. The only result will be public loss and the downfall of Dublin Bus and Bus Éireann, organisations that are vital to the social and economic life of this State. What is smart about actively discouraging people from using public transport? There have been fare increases, cuts to routes, cuts to fleets, fewer DARTs, and pay cuts for workers, which inevitably results in industrial action, as I warned in advance. These policies make public transport less attractive and make the Government's own argument: sell it off and be done with it. That is what Fine Gael wants, and what hope is there that the Labour Party has the guts or the wit to do anything to stop it?

The €10 million announced for remediation of pyrite-damaged houses is wholly inadequate and will not repair much more than a quarter of the 1,000 homes in most severe need of reparations and the thousands of other homes affected. This announcement also means that the public purse will foot this bill entirely while the quarries and construction firms that used pyritic materials go untouched. We accept that people have to manage their own budgets. The Minister knows that if one manages one's own budget, one cuts off all the excesses and extra expenses, particularly the high expenses. The Labour Party is the bones on which Fine Gael sharpens its teeth.

See this speech in context