Mary Lou McDonald (Dublin Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

There is only one word to describe the Finance Bill and the budget from which it stems, and that word is "insidious". The Minister tried to pull off some stunt on budget day, with efforts to spin and distract people from the worst of the Government's latest bout of brutal cuts. We said at the time that the devil would be in the detail. In the Social Welfare Bill and now in this Finance Bill, we see that detail.

On the night of the budget a tweet I saw really struck me. It was from a man who described himself as middle aged and well off. He said he was an architect and his wife was a solicitor, with a good income between them, and that they had not been hit by the budget. He said: "There is something wrong with that." In the budget, the Government, to protect higher incomes, did what it has done every year. It went after those on the periphery. It strikes me that the Minister purposely went after parents, at a particularly vulnerable time in their lives, be they separated fathers or pregnant women.

I wonder whether, between the taxing of maternity benefit last year, the successive cuts to child benefit, the under-funding of our maternity hospitals and now this cut to maternity benefit, the Government is committed to some kind of one child policy. I wonder if it is trying to turn the baby boom on its head, because it is making it incredibly expensive for people to have children. For those who think I am overstating the case, I would like to share with Members that only yesterday, my colleague, Deputy Pearse Doherty, received a reply to a parliamentary question from the Minister for Social Protection. She said in her response that maternity benefit on average in 2013 was paid to almost 22,000 women per week, but that in 2014 she expects it to be claimed by only 16,500 women per week. I am not joking. Either we must assume 5,500 fewer women will have babies next year because they cannot afford to have them under Government policies, or we are back to relying on emigration. Which is it Minister?

The Minister presented this Bill to us as though it is the answer to the jobs crisis. While I hope some measures will contribute to job creation, I cannot help but be sceptical. What we know is that when the Government has made a big song and dance about tax measures to create jobs in the past, for example SARP, it has not followed through and told us how many jobs it created.

I want to talk now about the substance of some of the measures in the Bill. The briefing note on the Department's website on the one-parent family tax credit points out that there was a flaw in this credit, in that it could be claimed by anyone even if he or she did not have a familial relationship with the child, provided the child stayed with them one night a year to be looked after. There is no doubt this was a flaw, but it should have been fixed by narrowing the definition. However, what the Minister did was abolish the credit. As a result, now mainly separated fathers - because the primary carer will be considered to be the parent in receipt of child benefit - have been hit with an extra tax of €2,490 a year. Even if the Minister moves to keep the extended tax band for these parents, they will still pay an additional €1,650 a year.

It might make sense to the Minister in his twisted logic that only the primary carer of the child has any expenses for that child, but I can tell him he is wrong on that score. Separated parents operate two households with two sets of expenses. This is a shocking tax hike on fathers. The Minister did not come into the Chamber on budget day and state every separated father in the State will pay an additional €2,500 in tax next year; he dressed it up as a name change for the tax credit. It is now apparent what he are doing, which I believe is shameful.

It is really astounding that after almost a year of consideration on how the standard fund threshold would be reduced, the Minister managed to include it in the Bill in such a way as to confuse even the experts in the field. Finance Bills are by definition difficult pieces of legislation, but when even the pension lobbyists are scratching their heads as they try to make head or tail of what the Minister is doing it must be a record. It is of concern that after promising the measure would raise €250 million in 2014 we are now told there is a €130 million hole in the budget and the standard fund threshold reduction will bring in only €120 million. I can only assume the pension levy which the Minister has hiked up and decided to keep going in some form will not be used for either job creation or pension crises but instead to fill this deficit in his figures. There are easier ways of approaching the tax treatment of pensions. They were contained in the national framework with which he agreed and which included a reduction in tax reliefs and pensions. He might consider revisiting this matter next year.

In recent years following budgets the Minister announced he was undertaking a review of various sectoral tax treatments. This year it is agricultural reliefs and last year it was research and development. When my party brought forward a Bill earlier this year calling for the equality proofing of budgets, he and his colleagues in the Labour Party voted it down. Equality proofing catches measures such as the one introduced for separated fathers. It ensures groups on the margin are not picked off or pitted against each other one by one. Anyone reading the Finance Bill or the Social Welfare Bill can see why the two Government parties are so set against equality proofing of budgets, but I continue to urge the Minister to make 2014 the year he commits to examining budgets and the Bills which follow them from an equality perspective, because it is badly needed.

I have heard a number of Government Deputies laud the fact that payments for the Magdalen laundry survivors will not attract any tax. All of us would have assumed this would be the case. I am very shocked to hear them highlight this as the big strength of the Finance Bill because as we speak not a single survivor has seen a single shilling by way of redress. In the time since the Taoiseach made the apology to the survivors and the redress scheme, such as it is, was agreed, two further survivors we know of have died and will never receive a single shilling, taxed or otherwise, by way of redress. I find it hard to listen to the compliments on the Finance Bill of Government Deputies commending the Minister on not taxing payments to women who, let us remember, were held against their will providing forced slave labour and who lived with stigma and trauma for decades afterwards. On the occasion of the reading of the Finance Bill I urge the Government to get the finger out, straighten out whatever difficulties there are between the various Departments, ensure the services these women deserve and ensure they get the very modest compensation envisaged by the State tax free and promptly. I hope in the course of the debate we will not hear another crowing Deputy from Fine Gael or the Labour Party on anything, but above all on the issue of compensation for the Magdalen women.

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