John Halligan (Waterford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

Yesterday's budget - as per tradition - was delivered in two halves, the first by the Minister for Finance and the second by Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform. Since I have been in the Dáil and since the Government took office, it has been the tradition to introduce a range of measures that will cumulatively advance us even further towards an Irish society of two very distinct halves - the rich and the poor or the haves and the have-nots. There was the usual attempt to portray a fair and balanced fiscal outlook but there has been nothing fair about the austerity foisted upon the Irish people through what I would call a bad political decision and bad political decisions in recent years. Yesterday's poor attempt to buy back votes with scraps was a further insult to the intelligence of very many people. Does the Government honestly believe people's memories are that short and that they can be dazzled by a couple of euro a week when their children are still living in exile in forced emigration, when their friends are losing the roof over their heads and when their neighbours are lying in pain on a hospital trolley waiting for a bed?

The big fanfare in the budget surrounded the USC "bonanza", as one newspaper called it and as the Government would like to portray it, and how it will give back squeezed middle-income earners around €10 a week. If one thinks of that, it is a princely sum of their own hard-earned money that will be quickly soaked up and taken away by water charges, household charges and, of course, all the other indirect taxes. It is a case of fingers crossed on the part of the Government that these people will be so overwhelmed with paying a percentage less that they will forget this tax was only intended to be a temporary measure in the first place.

Speaking of the squeezed middle, I am very disappointed at the Government's attempt to portray this budget as the antidote that hard-pressed working families have been waiting for. Granted, the additional 23 weeks of free preschool will benefit a significant number of families but what about those working parents whose children have already turned three years of age, many of whom have been speaking on the radio this morning? It is too late for these people to benefit from this measure. Ireland is now the most expensive country in the world for child care yet, astonishingly, there was no attempt in this budget to introduce measures aimed at universally affordable and accessible child care for middle-income earners who are currently forking out approximately €1,000 per month. There is a wholly inadequate €3-million allocation to support after-school services which I cannot see stretching very far. The school year only runs for 37 or so weeks of the year so what are working parents supposed to do outside term time? Young working parents have borne the brunt of the recession and they have been left hanging by this budget. It is not good enough. We have again turned our backs on even adequate child care services in this country.

It is interesting that the Minister for Finance said yesterday that the cost of renting accommodation was not a budgetary matter. This was an astounding statement to make. His reasoning behind not addressing rent controls or the price of rent was that he did not want to interfere and make matters worse than they already were. This is exactly what he said. One wonders just how much worse things will get before the Government faces up to the homelessness crisis. There are thousands of young adults over the age of 18 who are living with their parents and sleeping in sitting rooms and kitchens who consider themselves homeless so there are far more homeless people than those we define as being homeless. It is widely documented that the substantial gap between rent supplement and the famous housing assistance payment, HAP, and the actual rents being sought is causing homelessness and will continue to do so. I do not understand why the Government has not taken up the results of a survey carried out earlier this year that showed that only 12% of rental properties were available within rent supplement or HAP limits.

It is not working. The HAP is a complete failure and people in housing offices all over the country are saying the same thing. They may not say it publicly because it is not advisable to do so, but they tell me it is an absolute failure.

Threshold's Dublin tenancy protection service states the additional annual cost of providing 744 households in the capital with an increased rent supplement payment, to prevent them from becoming homeless, was, amazingly, €800,000. By comparison, €1.6 million was spent in providing emergency hotel accommodation for 361 homeless families in the Dublin region in July 2015 alone. Who balanced the books? Who came up with this in the budget? It is absolutely outrageous. If this is not a budgetary issue, as the Minister for Finance said yesterday, I do not know where he is going. I could not believe he had said it.

Another supposed "giveaway" yesterday that voters were quick to see through was the €3 per week increase for pensioners. The Government will hand pensioners three coins. That increase is negated immediately by failing to restore the lifeline that was the telephone allowance. Irish telephone costs are the sixth highest in Europe. The prescription charge has not been touched, which means that €1.50 is already gone because the charge rose over two years, while the meagre increase in the fuel allowance does not even restore the allowance to 2009 levels. In 1994, 5.9% of people in the country aged 65 years or older were at risk of poverty. Today the figure stands at 9.7% and this number will continue to increase, unless the Government rethinks its policy towards the elderly. It is not enough to throw an extra few euro at pensioners when a general election is looming. A person living on the State pension - all the statistics show this - is down €700 since 2008 in allowances and benefits and that is without taking into account the rising costs of living and increases in charges and taxes. Neither was any attempt made to replace the 2.34 million home help hours lost since 2008, on which elderly people are so reliant.

We need to move towards a progressive model that will tackle income inequality among the elderly such as a universal State pension, about which the Labour Party and other groups, including Social Justice Ireland, have spoken. Such a system would be financed not by increasing tax rates but by adjusting the current system, principally by making tax breaks for pension contributions available to everyone at the standard rate of rate and curbing tax benefits on private pensions that favour higher earners. This model has been costed by accountants in recent years and I am taken aback that the Government has not considered doing this.

There is an error in the budget submission on health. The Minister said the €13.5 billion allocated to the health service this year had brought it back to crisis levels. He obviously did not get his facts and figures correct because I checked back and in 2008 the Government allocated €15.5 billion. That was when the crisis was beginning and the health service was in crisis in 2008. Even now it cannot get a consultant to work 24 hours or in a hospital at weekends. Waterford General Hospital cannot get one to work at weekends. How can we deal with a health service which cannot provide rudimentary services? Young workers are forced to work for the minimum wage and if they do not do this and work terrible hours, their social welfare payments are cut off. Consultants on big earnings say they will not work beyond 4 p.m. or 5 p.m. on a Friday. They said it to the previous Government, too. Patients can forget about seeing a cardiac consultant after 5 p.m. in some hospitals. If he or she is on call somewhere, the hospital may or may not be able to get him or her to come back if a patient has a heart attack.

The Budget Statement refers to a spend of €13.5 billion, but it is not all a question of money. Medicines here are the most expensive in Europe and this has been said for 20 or 30 years. The Minister was completely wrong when he said yesterday that €13.5 billion was a huge sum that had never been given before. The previous Government invested €15.5 billion in 2008 when the health service started to go into absolute decline; therefore, it is not a question of money. The Government cannot deal with the essentials in the health service, providing care and making those paid to provide it such as the consultants do so. It cannot force pharmacists to bring down the price of prescription medications. Pharmacists are supposed to tell the customer about the generic brand available, but three quarters of them do not do so. We are at nothing in the health service when the Government is afraid to deal with the consultants and the cost of running the service.

I agree with the Labour Party that we should be aiming towards providing free health care. We should allocate €10 million, but all of this is subject to negotiation with the doctors' representatives, which means that the parents of a 12 year old child had better not hold their breath. When the Government tries to negotiate with doctors on this issue, the first thing they will want to know is how they will make or lose money. The Government should not have proposed this measure. It was economical with the truth to the electorate. It should have sorted out this issue. It would have meant a lot to people if it had been able to say "we have already concluded the negotiations and can do this now." It gives people the impression that if they have a 12 year old child, he or she can have free GP care, but that will not happen within two or three years, as the Minister of State at the Department of Health, Deputy Kathleen Lynch, knows as well as I do. The Government will not do this next year or even the year after that.

I do not like to be personal and critical of the budget. There are some good things in it, but an opportunity has been missed again. It gave back €1.5 billion, but €30 billion has been taken out of people's pay packets and through cuts in welfare services and so on over five years and it is not an awful lot to give back. A country is judged on how it treats the most vulnerable in its society, not those who have sufficient money to get by, but its most vulnerable. There are between 130,000 and 150,000 people on housing lists and people have been waiting four and five years for a medical procedure. It might be eight or nine months before they get to see a consultant. One in ten children goes to school impoverished. The Government has spent four years firing all hell on austerity. It has an opportunity to give back €1.5 billion, but it has not done that; it has not dealt with the people who need money. People come into my office every day of the week distressed because they cannot pay their mortgages. There were 800 facing eviction in the past two weeks. That is not the way it was supposed to be when the Government took office. It was supposed to deal with that issue and to protect people who, through no fault of their own, were losing their houses, but that has all gone by the wayside. They cannot now be protected. They are at the behest of a judge who will decide whether they should be evicted or be given a stay of execution.

The Government has underestimated the people if it thinks they will be bought by the budget. A conservative elderly lady said to me last week that the budget would not be like the last five or six when things were good and we were bought and sold. She said people were going to be analytical and examine this budget, what they would lose and what they should have got back. I understand the Government could not have given back €30 billion, but the redistribution of the money is unfair. This will come to pass in the next couple of months or shortly when people in the next few days analyse exactly what they have been given and what they should have received. It will not be seen as a favourable budget.

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