Micheál Martin (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

In every part of our country there are families facing the reality of a two-tiered, deeply unfair recovery. The way to assess this budget is not how many headlines it gets but how much it helps those who are being left behind. No matter what way you look at it, the budget has failed this test.

Yesterday the Government delivered the first of two election budgets. It had no social economic vision, purely a political one of electoral survival. The most leaked and most spun budget in Irish history contained no objective other than trying to dig the Government out of its current deep hole. It included a collection of measures designed to try to take the edge off many of the worst decisions of the past three years.

We have already been through three budgets, and a so-called "jobs budget", presented by this Government. The same pattern keeps repeating itself. The initial hype of Ministers and the cheers of Fine Gael and Labour backbenchers have ultimately been replaced by an angry public reaction. This year will be no different.

Ministers have become expert at hiding the pain and hyping the positives. In many cases figures presented as generous allocations have actually represented deep service cuts or, at best, the maintenance of existing policies.

As we listen to the Government praising itself and talking about how much it has delivered, we should remember what it said before. Last year’s budget produced tables showing every type of family, except those on over €150,000, maintaining the same disposable income. These were reproduced in all parts of the media and hailed by the Government as a turning point, but people soon saw that their disposable incomes kept going down. Property tax was doubled and a raft of other charges took effect.

It was this exact day last year when the then Minister for Health issued a statement saying that the Government’s generosity would mean that services would improve this year. Some 200,000 families were to get a GP visit card, mental health services were to expand and there was to be a minor and not very significant change in medical cards. We all know how that turned out. Thousands of medical cards were taken from the sickest and people who were very ill. The health service has been put under enormous stress during the year.

The basic preparation of the annual budget has indeed been reformed, but not in the way Ministers claim. It has been reformed by the politicisation of every element of its presentation. If one looks beyond the empty rhetoric one sees that the defining characteristic of the Government’s fiscal policy has been a decisive shift to a more regressive approach. The incomes of low- and middle-income families and the services they rely on have been targeted. As the Labour Party correctly predicted, every little cut has hurt. Today, the core regressive and unfair approach of the Government remains intact. Yet every budget of the last three years has been introduced with the claim that it was fair and protected vulnerable groups. We heard it again yesterday, and it is as untrue this year as it has ever been. The biggest winners, by some distance, are those on well above average incomes. When a person on €200,000 gets four times what is given to a minimum wage worker it is many things, but fair is not one of them.

This is a budget dominated by immediate political concerns, and because of this it is yet again a budget that supports no vision for the future of services such as health and education, on which people rely. There is no vision for respecting ability to pay when levying charges, improving the quality and number of jobs available in all parts of the country, reversing the destruction of rural services or tackling a deep and growing two-tier economy in which some are getting ahead and many are left behind.

In the first line of his speech yesterday the Minister, Deputy Noonan, said, "When the Government took office in March 2011, we set out a plan". This is, of course, absolutely untrue. The Government did nothing of the sort. There was no new budget for a year and there was no major change in any fiscal target. There was no new plan. The only significant new policy was to end the approach of the previous Government’s budgets, which were tough but highly progressive. This is not an empty political charge; it has been borne out by every independent study of the budgets of the last seven years.

This Government has been deeply regressive in its actions since it took office. By making budgets more unfair, refusing to be more responsive and focusing on headlines rather than the long term, Fine Gael and the Labour Party have directly worsened the two-tier recovery. There is a reason so many communities and families are not feeling the benefit of recovery - namely, the decisions made by Fine Gael and the Labour Party in government. The dominance of media management in the presentation of this budget has gone beyond the ridiculous. Through most of this year, "Tax relief is on the way" headlines have appeared on an almost weekly basis, adding "exclusive" to the list of words devalued by this Government.

Yesterday the Minister for Finance, Deputy Noonan, and the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform, Deputy Howlin, found the time to put out scripted political videos and tweet their selection of ties, but they became the first ever Ministers to deliver a budget and not have the basic courtesy to listen to the replies of Opposition speakers.

Seo Rialtas a bhfuil sé le rá faoi go bhfuil bearna ag fás i gcónaí idir an méid a deirtear agus réaltacht a ghníomhartha. Tá an méid ollmhór de gheallúintí briste atá ag fás go leanúnach le trí bliana anuas fós ann. An rud a chonaiceamar sa cháinaisnéis seo ná Rialtas scanraithe roimh an bpobal. Go bunúsach, ní thuigeann siad conas a bheith fírinneach agus oscailte le muintir na tíre seo.

Tá an Rialtas ag iarraidh a thabhairt le fios go bhfuil siad ag laghdú cánacha, ach an fhírinne ná go mbeidh an t-airgead a thógfar ar ais ón mbuiséad clainne an bhliain seo chugainn ag méadú. Tá an Rialtas ag iarraidh an dubh a chur ina gheal ar an bpobal go bhfuilidís ag feabhsú seirbhísí, nuair a bheidh na córais sláinte, oideachais agus leasa shóisialaigh ag streachailt arís an bhliain seo chugainn.

This is by any measure a cynical, short-term and political budget. One of the most cynical parts of it is the claim that the Government has delivered a fair tax system. Key statistics which help to make year-to-year comparisons have been removed from the budget material. In their place a new infographic has been presented. It is headlined with the claim that tax and USC are highly progressive in Ireland. The entire basis of this claim is found in measures that were in law before Fine Gael and the Labour Party came to office. In fact, both parties voted against the very measures for which they are now trying to claim credit. In regard to USC, it is new level of political cynicism to produce documents praising its progressiveness when both parties not only voted against it but campaigned against it in a general election.

The same type of approach is to be found in nearly every part of the budget. The Irish Fiscal Advisory Council was established to help direct policy, yet there is now a 100% record of its recommendations being ignored. We have even been refused the chance to debate its recommendations. The publication of the budget figures has been politicised in an unprecedented manner. Instead of showing the changes in services from year to year, the Government has presented absolute levels, and in this way presents cutbacks as if they were good news. I have never seen this before - the failure to give a proper presentation of Estimates in advance of a budget. The Government deliberately decided not to do that and to hide the facts from people in terms of the detail of departmental Estimates, outturns and so on. In previous years such information would have been published days and weeks in advance of a budget. In a small example of this type of approach, which is copied in every Department’s allocation, the budget claims that recovery is being supported because Science Foundation Ireland will support 3,000 researchers. It removed the figures showing that it used to support 20% more.

Basic income distribution tables which were formerly produced by Ministers in different governments are now absent, although they must exist, as the Department of Finance licenses the software which can produce these tables in minutes. The day after the budget, there are many basic things we still do not know about its impact on vital supports and services, and this is exactly what the Government wants. It wants to make claims but hide the contradictory evidence for as long as possible.

Unsurprisingly, Ministers have also heightened their attacks on the Opposition. Ministers are entirely correct when they attack Sinn Féin’s claims that everything tough can be abolished and huge resources can be available without any difficulty. This is just not credible. It is dishonest and it is about exploiting rather than solving problems. To be fair to Sinn Fein, it is simply following the same model of dishonest opposition patented by Fine Gael and the Labour Party before the last general election.

For this budget and each of the last three, Fianna Fáil’s spokespersons, Deputies McGrath and Fleming, have, together with colleagues, prepared and published detailed alternative proposals. Not only has everything been costed; all of it stands up to scrutiny. We have not blindly opposed Government proposals, but we have led the way in exposing the hidden costs and real impacts of its many bad decisions. We have not run away from the budgets we implemented in government. We took genuinely tough decisions which the Government left in place. It has actually included these measures in international presentations about how Ireland turned itself around. In these presentations the graphs are allowed to show the fact that nearly two-thirds of the vital changes were brought into law by Fianna Fáil and Green Party and that these changes hit the wealthiest the hardest. At home this truth is never acknowledged.

In the past three years there have been many hard choices to be made, but there have still been choices.  The impact of the Government’s budget decisions has been divisive and damaging, not because it had no choices but because it made bad ones. No amount of spin or manipulating the baselines on tables will get away from this, because it is reflected in the reality of what people experience every day.

We have seen many short-term projections, all of which have been wrong, but no plan or vision for the longer term. Last year there was a brief attempt to present a medium-term plan when the one inherited in March 2011 had run out. It was so unambitious and irrelevant that it is no longer referred to, even by Ministers.

It is amazing that in reviewing the reduction of the budget deficit the Government has failed to mention any of the major factors. There is no mention of how the ECB’s action has reduced interest rates for every state and of the technical restatement of GDP, which reduced the deficit by 1.6% at a stroke. The House will remember that this restatement included putting a value on illegal activity such as prostitution and including it in GDP, something fortuitous and useful in terms of the budgetary figures. This technical restatement has provided almost €2 billion in fiscal room within agreed targets.

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