Lucinda Creighton (Dublin South East, Independent) | Oireachtas source

Unfortunately, the spring statement has been a missed opportunity. It has certainly presented Ministers with an opportunity to clap themselves on the back and to praise themselves yesterday, all day today and again tomorrow, but we are not seeing a new vision for Ireland. On a number of occasions throughout both of the Minsters' speeches yesterday, the year 2020 was set as a purported medium-term target. A token effort was made to assure the House that the Government's policy outlook transcends the electoral cycle and truly has the economic health of the nation, rather than the political health of the coalition parties, at its heart. The reality is that the Ministers involved are painstakingly working to ensure that the economic cycle is firmly linked to the political cycle and, specifically, to the election due to take place next year. The spring statement should tell us where we want to be in two or five years' time. It should tell the working poor, of whom there are many in both the public and private sectors, how we plan to create a process of transformation that will allow them fulfil their potential. Instead, we have been presented with another incoherent list of scattered promises that offers us no roadmap to a genuinely better way of doing things on this island. It is just a roadmap for buying votes. As the Siteserv issue, Irish Water, the McNulty affair and GSOC scandal, among so many others, have shown us, the State remains fundamentally unchanged. The old Charlie McCreevy economics of "when I have it, I'll spend it" are alive and kicking today in the depressingly visionless tax and spend policies set out by the Ministers, Deputies Howlin and Noonan, yesterday.

Despite all of the references to 2020 and the future, the absence of any meaningful proposals or policies in the area of child care was notable. For the young families around Ireland for whom child care is an enormous financial burden and a huge source of stress, it will have been very disappointing to see that the only reference to child care made by Deputy Howlin was a vague mention of the activities of some vague working group. The spring economic statement document itself contained no mention whatsoever of child care. The Irish State currently spends 0.15% of GDP on child care, which is one-fifth of the OECD average of 0.75%. The Government's absolute inertia in the area of child care is creating a divide between parents and child care workers, all of whom are at breaking point financially owing to the high cost of crèche facilities. The Government's failure to address the plight of working families is politically and morally unacceptable. A cornerstone of RENUA Ireland's policies is to transform the model of child care in Ireland. It was encouraging to read recently that the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs, Deputy James Reilly, is actively considering adopting RENUA's approach to allowing parents to split statutory parental leave between them as they see fit. However, this is one small element of a comprehensive approach which will require tax breaks for parents who use child care facilities and the development of a network of community crèches across the country. None of this is envisaged in the spring statement and none of it has been mentioned by the Government in any serious way.

Another area in respect of which the spring statement was noticeably lacking in substance yesterday was support for indigenous Irish business. The SME sector accounts for 68% of employment across the Irish economy, yet there was nothing in the spring statement to suggest that the Government intends to overhaul the fundamentally unfair and discriminatory treatment of the self-employed and business owners in respect of tax and social welfare. Deputy Howlin stated yesterday that "a functioning society is a fair one, where the fruits of economic growth are shared among the people". In that context, it is extremely puzzling that the Government is willing to force the self-employed to pay up to eight times as much in income taxation as PAYE workers with equivalent earnings.

I also wonder whether the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform, Deputy Howlin, has the self-employed in mind when he states that the Government is committed to providing necessary welfare and other supports to those who need them because the self-employed are entitled to none.

At last night's press conference, the Minister for Finance, Deputy Noonan, said that the margin between the level of tax paid by the self-employed and PAYE workers should be reduced at the next budget, but he was not in any position to say by how much. No concrete details have been provided in this spring statement. The reality is that we cannot afford to wait for this discrimination to be incrementally phased out. It must be eradicated entirely in the 2016 budget.

There was nothing in the spring statement to suggest that the Government has any intention of broadening its economic horizon or developing an economic vision beyond growing the foreign direct investment, FDI, sector and the property sector. Two thirds of the employment growth targeted by the Minister for Finance and Enterprise Ireland is from foreign multinationals. What we heard in this Chamber yesterday will simply confirm to the owners of small businesses, self-employed people and the entrepreneurs across the country that this Government is not ready to recognise and appreciate the difficulties they face in operating and trying to grow their businesses.

The Government had flagged well in advance of the spring statement that public sector pay rises were on the way and the confirmation of this yesterday was hardly a surprise to any of us. It is very worrying to see that the coalition is happy to repeat the mistakes of the Celtic Tiger in its approach to public sector pay and remuneration. Deputy Naughten enunciated this very clearly when he quoted directly from a Fine Gael policy document issued before the last election. The forthcoming national economic dialogue is reminiscent of the social partnership model which Fianna Fáil led during the boom and then the bust. The coalition is seeking to buy the votes of trade unions through behind closed doors pay negotiations. We saw the same thing in the past. It is difficult to reconcile the boasts yesterday of the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform on productivity gains in the public sector with the Government's resistance to the introduction of any performance management and accountability in the public service. By agreeing to restore public sector pay over the coming years without achieving meaningful cultural and structural reforms within the public service, the Government is simply reverting to the failed policies of the past.

If the Government is set on putting extra money in people's wallets in advance of the election it should be done in as fair a way as possible. That is the stated aim of the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform but unfortunately the means suggest otherwise. That fairness could be achieved through changes to taxation rather than expenditure. A cut in the marginal rate of income tax combined with an adjustment in the entry rates across the taxation bands would genuinely impact upon employees of the public and private sectors equally. The so-called restoration of public sector pay benefits only one small section of our society, creates an unnecessary degree of partition in the workforce and undermines the social cohesion and solidarity which has been clearly demonstrated by the Irish people over the past seven years.

There is still time to pull back from the regressive return to Bertie Ahern inspired economic and political mismanagement in this country. All that is required is the political will to take a genuinely new and reforming direction. After four years of continuity Fianna Fáil policies, it is difficult, if not impossible, to believe that this Government has any desire to take a new path. This is a real shame and a wasted opportunity. I hope Ministers, such as the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine who sits across from me in this Chamber, will consider providing leadership within Government and will try to influence the direction so that it takes a much more positive and visionary path than what was produced in the disappointing spring statement presented by the Minister for Finance and the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform yesterday.

See this speech in context