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

I walked into the accident and emergency department, which was like Vietnam. When I went to the desk and asked how long it would be before seeing a doctor, I was told it would be at least 12 to 14 hours. There were patients in accident and emergency in pain, bleeding, suffering etc. The 12 or 14 hour waiting time was mid-week, at a relatively quiet time. God knows what it is like at busy times at the weekend. That is the state of the health service. That is what the Government is doing. That is why people are forced to take out private health insurance, not because they want to pay exorbitant health premiums but because they are terrified of the state of the public health system which the Government will butcher further again this year when more people will be forced to depend solely on that public system. It is a scandal.

At the same time that the Minister is doing this, there is a number of sections - I do not even have time to go into the details of them but I will at Committee Stage - with more tax breaks for high earners, such as in section 16 for what are called "passive investors" in capital allowance tax breaks. There are more corporate tax breaks for the big corporations in the area of research and development.

There are more tax breaks for participating institutions - banks which happen to be in NAMA. They are going to get another bailout. Incredibly, in his speech, the Minister justifies this by saying we need to give them more tax breaks so we do not have to bail them out. This is a bailout. It is another bailout for the banks that we bailed out to the tune of €64 billion. The Minister now is going to give them tax breaks on the losses they have incurred. It is shocking.

Other breaks include capital gains tax incentives for investors in new assets and trading activities, and following last year, more tax breaks for those involved in speculation on the financial markets speculating in stocks and marketable securities. It is incredible when what we need is a financial transaction tax. The modest proposal of the European Commission is that we put 0.1% of a financial transaction tax on speculation in stocks, shares and derivatives which, the Commission estimates, would raise €500 million. The Government, worse than setting its face against doing that, gives them more tax breaks. It is extraordinary. It did so last year as well.

Just so that the public will be aware, the Minister has also further elaborated the new property tax breaks that it gave under the so-called real estate investment trust, REIT, system. When property tax breaks and incentives fuelled the bubble and encouraged the developers in a frenzy of greed that has wrecked this economy, is it not unbelievable that Fine Gael is doing it again by giving more tax breaks to these guys? Meanwhile, there are 110,000 families on the social housing waiting list. The Minister has put a full stop to the provision of affordable social housing, yet again prioritising the developers and big business and bidding be damned to the ordinary people who need an affordable roof over their head.

The gross irony of this situation is that for a very few months in 2008, when the economic crash hit this country and the global economy, there was a very short window when even people on the ideological spectrum of Fine Gael acknowledged that maybe there were some problems with the market and that maybe, even if we did not go as far as Karl Marx, we might at least look at John Maynard Keynes and a little bit of regulation of the markets. Instead, how long has it taken for Fine Gael to revert to type and let the market rip, regardless of the consequences for society and the economy?

Then we have the repeated mantras that those of us who criticise this present no alternative, when the Government knows that this is absolute nonsense and that we do it repeatedly in here. What we need when the market has failed, when there has been a 70% drop in investment - which is what is needed for this economy to restart - is for the State to step in. We need public investment. Éamon de Valera was not a socialist by any means but even he understood that an economy on its knees in the 1920s and 1930s needed the State to drive investment. That is why he created ESB, Bord Gáis and all of the public enterprises which helped to bring this economy out of Third World status and develop it as a modern economy. That is what we need. How can we do that-----

See this speech in context