Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, Socialist Party) | Oireachtas source

I join Deputy Broughan in asking what will be the estimated cost of this extra tax expenditure. I presume the Minister is not talking about a huge amount of money but for me this is a microcosm of the approach of the Government on a range of issues, which is to go for corporate welfare as opposed to public investment in services. The total corporate welfare bill is conservatively somewhere around €15 billion a year in terms of tax breaks and expenditure aimed at corporations. This will increase it somewhat. We would like to see the figures to see how much it is. It is based on the logic of Thatcherism, which is to run down public services and then to use that as an excuse to say we do not have nursing homes so we have to give them tax breaks in order to extend nursing homes to have appropriate nursing homes, as opposed to publicly investing in building public nursing homes in the first instance. It sums the Government's approach to the budget and its claim to the effect that it has restored health spending to pre-crisis levels. It is evident that the latter is not the case and that the amount involved is still €3 billion below pre-crisis levels. The Government's response in the context of this budget has been to opt for tax incentives as opposed to public investment.

See this speech in context