Pearse Doherty (Donegal South West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Yes, and that is the €24 million. However, the need for resource teachers and all the other needs in education are not being met.

Year after year, child and poverty agencies have highlighted the increased costs for parents to put their children through an education system that is supposed to be universal. The damage this Government has done to the education system is far reaching. Over the course of its first three budgets, it cut education funding by nearly €500 million. It is putting €24 million back. Cuts to resource teaching hours and guidance teachers have been particularly regressive, hitting vulnerable kids the hardest. The Government has hiked up the cost of third level education for struggling families by €750 a year, it has reduced the income thresholds for third level grants, it has cut the back to school clothing and footwear allowance by a third for primary school children and it has introduced fees for apprenticeships and has cut funding to third level colleges, VECs and a range of higher education bodies.

It would have been possible to start to address all of these issues. We showed how it could be done in our alternative budget. We showed that reversing the cut to guidance teachers would put 700 guidance teachers back into our schools to provide guidance to pupils. We would have restored teaching hours, providing 1,183 extra teachers for children with special needs and would have reduced primary class sizes by putting 250 additional teachers into the system. That is the only measure taken by the Government. We would also have increased funding to the school meals programme, the school book grants scheme and the back to school clothing and footwear allowance. We would have reduced the third level contribution fee by €500, going some way to reduce costs on struggling families for third level education.

In the health area, the Government cut services by over €2.5 billion over the course of its first three budgets. Is it any wonder there is a deepening crisis right across the health system? The Government targeted mental health, children’s services and disability services, increased the threshold for the drug payment scheme by 20%, increased prescription charges for the least well off, cut front-line posts by up to 10% and slashed the regional drugs-related initiatives by 12%. It did nothing to address any of these cuts in this budget. Sinn Féin has shown how the Government could have invested an additional €383 million in health - ensuring that investment would target areas of most acute need - above the amount needed to deal with demographic pressures. We showed how it could provide an additional 1,900 front-line posts, including consultants, nurses, midwives, speech and language therapists, occupational therapists and physiotherapists. We have also shown how the Government could have provided for an automatic medical card for children with significant medical needs arising from serious illness or disability. We have shown how it could invest in emergency departments, maternity care, mental health and disability services, dental care for workers and medical card holders and how it could provide increased emergency ambulance cover.

All of this would have been possible within the same fiscal space, but all the Government has decided to do is to provide an €18 million new health spend when demographics and the pay restoration measures of the Lansdowne Road agreement are stripped out of the allocation. Mark my words, this is not going to work. The big problem here is that until now, whenever we told the Government it would not work, it could introduce a Supplementary Estimate. The one for this year is likely to be in region of approximately €600 million. However, that will not be available next year because of the rules the Government negotiated under the austerity treaty - the expenditure benchmark. Therefore, when health begins to overrun again, we will see brutal cuts to front-line services, but the Government knows that will happen on the other side of a general election and hardly cares.

Not a single new Garda was trained between 2010 and 2013. A paltry 200 new recruits were taken in last year and the numbers for the last two years did not even cover the number of retirements from the service over the same period. Although 600 new gardaí in 2016 sounds like a lot, as the Minister herself acknowledged, about 400 gardaí retire each year. It is a net increase of about 200 gardaí. We have shown the Government how it could have increased the force by an additional net 1,000 gardaí, but it refused to do it. Since entering Government the so-called party of law and order has cut the strength of the Garda Síochána by nearly 10%. That is a shocking record by any standard.

The Government closed the rural Garda stations at a saving of less than €1 million. We have shown how it could invest in community policing by training an additional 1,000 gardaí to ensure the strength of the force gets back to where it was before Fine Gael got its hands on the Department of Justice of Equality.

Tá na postanna úra seo, i dtaca le foireann túslíne, 6,500 ar an iomlán. Tá siad i dteannta le na postanna a bhí de dhíth sa bhliain 2016. Thaispeáin muidne i bpácáiste infheistíochta Shinn Féin an dóigh gur féidir leis an Rialtas €300 milliún a chur san áireamh le haghaidh athruithe déimeagrafacha a láimhseáil.

We also showed the Taoiseach how he could embark on an ambitious capital investment of an additional €400 million, of which €300 million would be directed to tackling the housing crisis head on. However, the Government has decided to cut overall capital investment by €55 million and has said that, within the overall package, it will allocate €69 million for housing. That is miserly. It is just under a quarter of what was cut from the housing budget in 2012. Again in 2013 the Government halved funding to local authority housing, and cut another 10% in 2014. The Minister of State and his colleagues have a neck to come in here with a tear in their eye after yet another homeless man has died on the streets of our capital city. What exactly is it going to take before they acknowledge the scale and depth of crisis in emergency and social housing?

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