Peter Mathews (Dublin South, Independent) | Oireachtas source

Two big tomes with coloured covers were distributed to the House yesterday by the respective Ministers of Finance and Public Expenditure and Reform. I really had to fight my way through them. In the case of the finance budget, headline figures that should have been in the introduction were buried deep down. These are headline figures about what the amount of GDP and GNP will be. These should be the starting figures because they show the scale of what is ahead economically in this country. Referring to percentages and suggesting that this is up and that is down and so on is like talking about the children growing by 3%. What was the starting figure? It is a bad and confusing place to be.

I call this budget illusion budgeting based on delusion economics, because the setting in the introduction of the budget was one whereby the cock believed the sun rose because he crowed. In other words, the members of the Government believe everything is right because of what they did. In fact, they did little. In fact, they made life very difficult for a great number of families - I estimate approximately 1.5 million citizens. It has been decidedly tough for them, their lives have been ripped apart and no ointment or bandages of any sort will help.

The budget shows that the Government of Fine Gael and the Labour Party clearly favours Ireland's better-off. The people were not fooled in the two recent by-elections, the European elections or, for that matter, the local elections in May. That is why they voted for authentic straight-talking Independents who will fight for hard-pressed citizens, the vulnerable and the less well-off. There has been no fight from the Government, zero fight.

The revenue that the Government dedicates to meeting the expenditure every year is raised from taxation. Taxation can only come from two reservoirs: the income of individuals or people and the income of corporations or companies. That is all. Introducing taxes like property taxes to broaden the tax base is bunkum. Introducing water charges to broaden the tax base is bunkum. Those charges or tax bills should be met out of income. Those in government did not have the guts to address the multinational companies, MNCs, which come in under the umbrella of foreign direct investment. MNCs may employ 160,000 people but indigenous businesses, honourable business people and farmers, employ far more. MNCs have had a profit surge since 2008. When those in the current Government came to power in March 2011 they did not have the courage to explain why it would be right, fitting and proper for those incomes to contribute a levy for three years for national recovery. That would have produced €2 billion per year and it would have contributed greatly to the costs of providing a health service, a police service, nurses' pay, Garda pay, the pay of doctors who have since gone abroad and the cost of the education system, which needs more teachers. Emigrants have gone off. This is why there was no vision, only cowardliness.

Financial Resolution No. 3 sounds like perhaps a nice wine to drink or perfume, but for 1.5 million people it is no such thing. Rather, it is acid and pain because their position has not changed. Let us consider the figures on housing and people without houses. How many people slept rough on Grafton Street last Wednesday? Michael, the vendor of the newspapers, who starts work early, could tell me because he counted them: there were 40. These are the realities.

The worthwhile studies by economists and financial people who understand these things show that distributive economics works. I am unsure where the Government gets it from. The ESRI maintains we are not getting more unequal, but we are and it is obvious. The ownership of capital is in narrower hands and capital is the only thing that has grown. Has the Government not noticed? Incomes have gone backwards, including the incomes of those in the House, the staff of the House and everyone else, but those of corporates have not.

The greatest embarrassment to me is that the Government was gutless when it came to the debt. This day last year the German Minister, Mr. Schäuble, had the audacity and temerity, on the day that our Minister for Finance was introducing a budget, to say that there would not be sharing of losses, neutralisation or, as the Government terms it, retrospective bank capitalisation - that is a rubbishy term. We should call it the elimination of losses in one bank at €32 billion which has been put on the people. That is wrong. I salute people like Diarmaid O'Flynn, who nearly got a European Parliament seat on a shoestring budget, for their honesty, persistence and clarity of thought. He understands better than the people in the opposite benches what the promissory note was and what the promissory bonds mean. They should be torn up. They are odious losses, not even debt. I call on the Government to think again. This is the opportunity to address the problem but the Government did not even mention it in the budget. What a shame.

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