Billy Kelleher (Cork North Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

This week alone, I received representations in my office from a person whose child cannot get speech and language therapy, a family facing homelessness and a woman who was told that she had been placed on the urgent waiting list for an outpatient hospital appointment and that she would be called in two years' time. Those are just three cases. I am quite sure every Deputy in this House who has an office or holds clinics has received similar representations. This is not unusual. It is usual in this day and age to receive those representations on an ongoing basis.

The Minister says we cannot have it both ways. He cannot have it both ways either, because he has responsibilities as well, not only in the context of the health budget we will be debating when the service plan is published in a number of weeks' time, but in the principle of this budget. The Government has tried to emphasise that this is not about the next election. Quite clearly, it is about the next election. The focus groups and polling have come back with their results and they have informed the Government's thinking in this budget. Fine Gael has decided that it is going to go for tax reductions aimed at the higher earners. It is a decision that Fine Gael has made. It is throwing the dice in the hope that it will be rewarded whenever the election comes. I cannot see any reason as to why the Government would not have prioritised the three people who called to my office this week and the many more people who call to Deputies' offices on all sides of the House with problems they face on a continual basis. That is a decision the Government has made. Perhaps I should address these points to the Labour Party, because one would have hoped that it might have more of a social conscience, but that has long since evaporated in this Parliament.

I would have liked to speak about the substance of the actual budget, but reference has been made to the spending patterns in previous times. Before I came down to this Chamber, I had one quick look at the Fine Gael manifesto from 2007. I can assure the Minister that no matter how much he accused me of spending in 2007 to buy the electorate, Fine Gael was well ahead of the game and the Labour Party was in front of it again. The idea that my party was the only party in this House that was consistently trying to spend more and reduce taxes is simply not credible. I said here that we need an honest debate on many things but we simply have not received any honesty from the Government in terms of where we are as a country.

The Government parties opposed every single measure from this side of the House in the four-year plan. Yesterday, the Ministers for Finance and Public Expenditure and Reform stood up in this Chamber and told the people that the policies were working. They are working. I do not want or expect any credit for it, but there must be an acknowledgement that for the three and a half to four years during which the Government has been in power, it has been implementing policies that it fundamentally opposed in every aspect of debate in the Chamber through the very difficult times of 2008, 2009, 2010 and up to the general election in 2011. The Government parties opposed them all. We are being accused of having the audacity to raise issues that we feel are deficient in this budget. I am not asking the Minister to spend an awful lot more money, but I am asking him to prioritise. An increase of €5 in child benefit to a family earning over €100,000 is almost meaningless, but I can assure the Minister that €5 per month would make a awful difference to a family facing homelessness and huge difficulties in terms of basic subsistence living.

It is about priorities, and the Government's priorities have been very focused. They have been focused on certain cohorts of the electorate: first, those who vote, and second, those who are more likely to vote for Fine Gael. The Labour Party has decided to go along with this again. That is what this budget is about, because I have looked through it to see where the element of fairness and the reconstruction of society to tip the balance in favour of those who most need it are found. It is regressive at every step when one measures it on fairness. The person on the minimum wage receives €3 per week extra in this budget. By the time January comes, he or she will have water charges and bills to face as well. For all those reasons, this budget is a regressive budget. I will dwell on this for longer when I come back to the HSE plan, whenever it is published.

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