Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I look forward to hearing that tomorrow. Where is the benefit for people who are renting, mainly younger people? I did not hear it in the budget today. Maybe I am missing something. I would like to hear chapter and verse of what it is tomorrow.

There is a third issue for young people. There was a big hurrah over the €35 million to be given for third level education, which I welcome. However, Fine Gael’s manifesto acknowledged that our third level sector is in such a crisis that it needs an immediate injection of at least €100 million just to stand still. We all know that every sector in education needs money, but third level is in an acute crisis. It is affecting the quality of the education and is causing long-term damage. There are always difficult choices in budgets; it is not easy. If the Government is spending more on one, it has to cut elsewhere. I would have preferred a slightly more strategic decision rather than giving everyone something. We should have given more to third level.

I raise a final issue affecting young people. We should have given young people the same increase in dole payments as we gave everyone else. That measure was introduced six years ago in some of those very difficult decisions for budget 2011 where we started to reduce the dole for younger people. It was made much worse in the budgets for 2012 and 2013, as I recall. Why are we continuing it here today by not giving the full €5, which is going to other people on unemployment benefit and indeed to pensioners, to those under 26? There are some occasions - as a young person I have been there myself - where young people are on the dole for a variety of reasons. We should not have given the signal we have given today - that they are cared for less. It is not as if the amount of money paid in dole is a huge incentive not to work. It is not even subsistence. I do not think that was right. I regret that we sent that small but critical signal to our young people.

Another area where we failed to make a strategic change and failed to move to the centre is in the area of climate change. We have only increased overseas international development aid by €10 million. Ireland is the most open international trading country in the world. It behoves us, who benefit from this international trading system, to be one of the leading contributors to helping those countries that need development support, particularly at a time when climate change is starting to hit as we saw in Haiti last week where they need additional support. It is not right for our brand and our sense of ourselves as a country. It is not right that our overseas aid as a percentage of gross national income is now contracting rapidly. That should have been done differently and should have changed.

The Minister, Deputy Donohoe, said it was great and indicated we were taking climate change seriously. We are not. No public transport projects are ready to go. One cannot tell from the figures much about the budget, but I heard nothing today about promoting cycling or walking which would be highly beneficial in climate terms as well as for our health and making our cities and country work better.

There is nothing new in energy. There are no new initiatives or schemes. Where are the smart meters?

Where is the new, additional and ambitious scheme around electric vehicle charging points? Where are the advanced, sophisticated, energy-efficient aggregated demand management schemes that other countries are looking to start introducing? There is nothing new here. There is some of the old, which I still very much welcome, such as the retrofit schemes, but there are no new ideas. It is not as if the issue is not centre stage elsewhere. The Juncker plan has just been increased by €200 billion and 40% of that is going to go towards energy efficiency and low-carbon technologies. If Ireland was developing an ambitious scheme on climate change, we could take some of that money. We do not have 40% of our additional budget going towards climate change measures, we do not even have 4%. We probably do not even have 1% or 2% - perhaps the figure is less than that.

We do not take this issue seriously. We are doing nothing in respect of diesel even though the evidence could not be clearer. The level of diesel car sales is killing our people. Diesel car sales have got to go. Only last week, the Bundesrat - Germany's equivalent of our Upper House - passed an all-party motion to the effect that there will be no more combustion engines after 2030. That is what the rest of the world is doing. That is their ambition with regard to taking the environment seriously. We issued a tax strategy report which set out measures and the need to do this. We sent our submission to the Minister and said it could be done in a revenue-neutral way which would not hit the motorist but which would give a signal to stop people buying diesel cars. We need to do this because diesel is giving our children asthma, it is giving us heart attacks, it is affecting our lungs and, according to the latest evidence this week, it is giving us Alzheimer's disease. We were told by Volkswagen that it was okay, that they would be able to produce engines in a clean way but it turns out that the company was not telling the truth. Why are we doing nothing about it when we said we were going to do something about it over a five-year period? We cannot keep trading as a green country, we cannot say that we are putting an additional €50 million into Origin Green - more than into all of our other climate change measures combined - but not actually be origin green, which is the sad truth, in terms of how we move forward. We are the furthest from our climate change targets for 2020 and heading rapidly in the wrong direction. There is nothing in this budget at all to address that. Consider also the scale of change. The civil servants know about this. We are just about to ratify the Paris treaty, which means we are to change our entire energy system, climate system, food system and transport system. However, what I read in the budget makes it a case of tomorrow and mañana.

With regard to the process, Ireland should be putting together a carbon budget. We introduced that mechanism. It is a very sensible mechanism to put a check in place to see how we are actually doing and assessing what we signed up to do in Paris. Ireland is not doing it but we should at least be budgeting for and measuring it. It is going to take time to read the budget material. There is material on the Gini coefficient and so on but we spent a great deal of time in the budget advisory committee thinking about equality-proofing budgeting. I would love to see simple, easy, understandable measures for assessing what we have here. Perhaps there are some good equality measures in the way things have been done-----

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