Clare Daly (Dublin North, United Left) | Oireachtas source

There is a certain smugness around this debate that I find quite disquieting. The reality is that we have the annual pantomime. Everybody knows the ending, the predictable set pieces, the mock hilarity, the great jubilation on that side, the mock outrage on this one, the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform, Deputy Brendan Howlin, trying to whip up the chorus, the Minister for Finance, Deputy Michel Noonan, trying to go one better and convince us that he can do magic and buck the markets and economies everywhere and get rid of the cycle of boom and bust. Seriously, it would be funny except that there is no fairy tale going on in the real world. What we have today, sadly, is another example of the disconnect between this House and reality.

George Bernard Shaw once made the point that the Government that robbed Peter to pay Paul would always have the support of Paul. There is no doubt about it; this Government represents Paul. The top 20% in the State now own 73% of the wealth under the Government’s stewardship. The personal wealth of the top 300 individuals increased by €13.5 billion last year alone yet there is not a single measure to touch or tap into that resource to transform society. In fact, they will go to bed richer tonight. What the budget does attempt to do is give back to Peter some of the concessions and entitlements the Government robbed from him in the first place in the hope that he will vote for it again. That is cynical in the extreme. The Government will find that Peter is not going to be so easily bought.

What I find really sickening is that people elected and voted for the Government because they thought it would be different. They thought the Government parties represented a different Ireland, but they have turned out to be the same.

Members correctly started the day by marking the appalling loss of life that took place in this State over the weekend. While they were terrible accidents and horrible events that I know no one present wanted to happen, can Members state they are disconnected from decisions that are made in this House? Members are correctly horrified by the death of Garda Anthony Golden who was just doing his job. What an utter tragedy but the truth is that more women are murdered or killed in violent assaults by their partners than there are gardaí killed on duty.

The response of Members to this is to cut the funding to rape crisis centres by 20% and to decimate front-line services for those women. Members correctly cry over the loss of children and the families in the halting site in south Dublin. The Taoiseach made the point that these are innocent children; and they are in their death. However, in their life, we live in a society in which Traveller children are put up on the PULSE system and in which the Government has stood over the decimation of funding to Traveller accommodation from €70 million per year a number of years ago to €4.3 million. A third homeless citizen has been found dead on the streets of the capital city and in response, the Minister speaks in this Chamber of €500 million to deal with social housing. This is the same amount the Government discounted in last year's budget to the top 17%. It could deliver perhaps 3,000 houses when 130,000 people are on the list. The Government does nothing to deal with the rent cap issue, meaning more people will not be able to avail of the €2 restored to the fuel allowance because they will not have a roof over their heads.

The Government does nothing about how the pupil-teacher ratio, even after its changes, still is one of the worst in Europe. It will do nothing for my friend Kevin, who spent three nights on a trolley in Galway and who yesterday received a bill in the post for €150. Members are celebrating how 700,000 people will now be out of the universal social charge net. While I welcome this, it tells one that 700,000 people are surviving in this State on an income of less than €13,000 per year. While the minimum wage has been raised, and correctly so, nothing is being done about the low hours, the zero-hour contracts and the part-time work which means that additional 50 cent per hour does not mean much if one is only getting ten hours of work in a week. Members are standing over a society in which values have been decimated. Given the wealth that exists, they have an opportunity to use it to transform lives and to turn the country into a better Ireland but instead, the Government forfeited that for the mediocre and for feathering the nests of those at the top. The Government should have called an election in November because the people are sick of it and this budget will not change this.

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