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

In the past three years the Tánaiste managed the incredible task of talking like a left-wing dissident in her party while implementing an almost Thatcherite welfare policy. She cut €2 billion from the weakest sections of society and told people to simply get off the couch and look after themselves. She cut support towards funeral costs and then talked about how high funeral costs were in Dublin, as if people could shop around to achieve better value. The overwhelming bulk of cuts, all of which the Labour Party had promised to oppose when it was campaigning, remain fully in place. Child benefit remains €5 below the level which both the Labour Party and Fine Gael stated they would maintain. Because of the failure to give a proper credible free allowance for water charges, the increase in child benefit could literally disappear as fast as a few extra flushes of the toilet each week. The promise to protect the most vulnerable remains broken and the Labour Party leadership change has not delivered any significant change in policy on vital social supports. Many grand promises were made about child care during and after the last general election. In our budget submission we proposed a series of initiatives that would significantly help families with child care needs. Unfortunately, the Government has chosen to do the minimum possible and pushed child care off the agenda for another year.

A feature of the two-tiered recovery has been the absence of high quality and secure employment for many. The budget does not set out a vision for tackling this significant issue in developing the economy and our society. We have always been fully supportive of inward investment, which remained strong in the toughest parts of the recession, but this has not been acknowledged. The areas identified as national strategic priorities a decade ago have delivered well for us, as has the investment in research which we made.

The Government has provided as little detail as possible on the announced changes to corporate tax rules.  We are concerned that it has moved so quickly to abandon its position that current rules are in order and that changes should only take place on a co-ordinated international basis. Why have we decided to move without linking the changes with similar ones in the Netherlands and other countries which have almost identical rules? Why has this change not been linked with a demand that the impact of bank related debt be removed? Has the Government formally abandoned a demand which the Ministers, Deputies Michael Noonan and Brendan Howlin, once said could be worth tens of billions of euro to Ireland?

We must continue to attract and support inward investment. The failure to produce an impact analysis of the changes is, at best, manipulation of public opinion and, at worst, suggests the Government has taken a risky and ill-thought out step. Equally, we must start to take seriously the needs of small and medium-sized businesses, but the sector has largely been ignored in the budget. Small and medium-sized businesses employ hundreds of thousands of people and are the foundation of the domestic economy. They have suffered deeply in recent years and need to be a priority. Some of the changes made will benefit them, but the Minister for Finance confirmed last night that the policy was to hope the rising tide would eventually lift the SME boat. The majority of SMEs are run by people who are self-employed for tax purposes. Important and affordable changes which would help them have been ignored. Also ignored was the critical issue of financing. Credit is not yet flowing to SMEs in the economy. Legacy debt in the SME sector remains a permanent drag on them and the domestic economy.

A MABS-style service for SMEs is needed immediately, as is a dedicated fund for helping SMEs.

Housing is an area in which the Government has finally woken up to a crisis that it allowed to develop.  The rental market has been made unsustainable and core supply has been neglected.  Ministers took an approach to NAMA which focused on selling off properties as quickly as possible and ignored any wider social needs. Housing has had a Labour Party Minister at Cabinet for three and a half years but it is only now that a housing plan has been published.  Incredibly, it is one that may directly feed a new housing bubble.

Completely abolishing the windfall property tax risks a return to destructive land speculation. Combined with the halving of the requirement under Part V of the Planning and Development Act 2000 to 10% social housing provision, the mechanisms for providing social benefit from future development have been rolled back by the Government. At the same time, there are no measures for dealing with the problems faced by renters, who will be excluded from the housing market by new Central Bank demands with regard to savings. Many of the problems faced by renters are the direct result of the Tánaiste’s policy on restricting rent supplement, and there is not a Deputy in the House who does not know this. The changes to rent supplement have had a disastrous impact on people desperately seeking high-quality housing. That is the reality on the ground. The hardest hit areas remain the major urban centres, so this failure means that the most acute aspect of the housing crisis will not be addressed.

The Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government, Deputy Kelly, has been very assertive in recent weeks in talking about housing in the media, while at the same time trying to keep his head down on the growing public anger about Irish Water and its crumbling justification. When this Fine Gael idea was announced, the core rationale was that it would be incredibly efficient and charges would be simple.  Yesterday, the Government tried a last-minute rescue on the worst impact of the charges.  It has failed. It remains a highly regressive charge which does not fully respect the citizen’s ability to pay, and it is now one of the most complicated charges ever introduced.  Once this budget is enacted, there will be four separate ways to assess the charges.  Once it is collected, it will be used to fund a gold-plated bureaucracy, paying executive bonuses and incurring costs which even the former Minister of State who set it up now admits are simply unjustifiable. Deputy O'Dowd was correct: it has been an unmitigated disaster in terms of the Government's implementation and execution of the Fine Gael policy.

This is the first budget since the reshuffle in which the Taoiseach’s main objective was to stop the complete implosion of the health system, or at least to stop the health system from damaging the Government’s electoral chances.  Even though he and his colleagues cheered the work of the former Minister for Health, Deputy Reilly, every step of the way, he was made the scapegoat and a new Minister was installed.  This was to be the budget in which he delivered a complete change in policy.  It has not happened. The spin about the budget is that it has given the health system an increase in funding and services will be improved.  Just as last year’s spin was false, so too will this year’s be exposed.

The first thing that has to be said is that there was, in fact, no overspend in the HSE.  The Government ordered a certain level of services but refused to acknowledge the cost.  It gave us a false and dishonest presentation on health this time last year. When the bill came, the Government expressed surprise and condemned the HSE management.  It has been a shoddy spectacle. For next year, we are told that spending will be at this year’s level.  If this turns out to be true - and we may have to wait months to find out because of the way Ministers now interfere in HSE statements - then what it will do is to maintain this year’s rate of decline. Maintaining funding will not stabilise services because waiting lists are rising and the Government itself says that €200 million is needed to deal with demographic changes. The health service is in crisis. The workers are being put to the pin of their collar through a deliberate strategic electoral decision to starve health of funding in order to enable the Government to do other things. The supposed negotiating success of the Minister, Deputy Varadkar, has another large hole in it because it is based on his finding the money for himself.  The budget documentation states that there will be €130 million in savings and €330 million in new income, but this translates into other service cuts and increased charges.

Everybody here knows how the urgent the needs are in the field of mental health.  Yesterday, we were told that relief is on the way.  Unfortunately, the details show that the €15 million taken from the mental health budget this year will not be restored. This budget shows no commitment at all to tackling the growing crisis in the health services.  It doubles down on the already discredited reform programme, which is multiplying problems caused by low funding.  It re-promises initiatives that were supposed to be in place two years ago. All the evidence is that 2015 will be another bad year for the health system. With growing evidence of a major outbreak of a most damaging drugs situation in provincial centres, the refusal to act now rather than let the crisis develop will have deeply damaging long-term effects.

One of the many pre-budget leaks - we had it again this morning from the Tánaiste - concerned how a major development was planned for school staffing.  Instead of this, what has been announced is that existing pupil-teacher ratios will be left in place.  The maintenance of current policy, once something that was left to technical documents, has now become a central part of budget spin. In previous times, if population increased, the number of teachers automatically increased - it was called the demographic dividend in education. It was left to the technical documents and no Government would have the brass neck to claim credit for it. This Government trumpets it, leaks it as an exclusive and it is a central part of budget spin.

In our alternative budget proposal, we showed how the most damaging parts of the Government’s education policy could be undone next year.  Instead of maintaining current levels of overcrowding, there was an opportunity to cut the pupil-teacher ratio and restore a desperately needed careers and guidance service, which the Government has savaged.

During the summer, there were many reports about how the Government was going to give a new impetus to rural affairs.  Yesterday, we discovered it was yet another broken promise. The cumulative impact of cuts targeted at rural schools, hospitals, gardaí and other basic public services has had a deep impact.  In many places, the fabric of the local community has been threatened. In 2011, the portfolio of rural affairs was removed from the Cabinet.  This has been followed by three years in which a difficult situation for rural communities has been made much worse by Government decisions. It would have cost €6 million to reverse the damage caused to small rural schools by Deputy Quinn when he was Minister for Education and Skills, but it was not a priority for the Government.  It would have cost a fraction of the overall budget changes to restore proper rural policing, but again, it was not a priority.  Rural towns need support and urgent intervention. Again, a little would have gone a long way. Moreover, the failure to invest properly in the rural social scheme and the delaying of national funding of important farm income supports means that all farm families remain at the mercy of a malfunctioning market which is stacked against producers.

This budget has been heralded by the Government as a turning point, even more than the Government had heralded last year’s budget as a turning point. Because of a combination of factors, the Government had the opportunity to undo some of its worst decisions and shape a recovery which could be genuinely felt by all. It had the opportunity to set out a vision for our economy and society and begin working to achieve it. It had the opportunity to make classes smaller, reduce waiting lists, invest in infrastructure and support rural communities. It had the opportunity to show a commitment to the future development of our public services. Instead, it decided to look to the short term.  In the first of two election budgets, it has spread money around in a way that helps some but leaves many deep problems untouched.

Today, the Government continues to roll out its prepackaged messages and announcements, just as it did last year.  However, at a critical moment in defining the future of our economy, our public services and our support for families and communities, the Government has chosen the path of putting politics first.  Because of this, it will come to realise sooner rather than later that the Irish people will not fall for the spin and complacency of which Fine Gael and the Labour Party are today so proud.

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