Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

This budget is an establishment budget of crumbs and scraps that will make next to no difference to the lives of the vast majority of ordinary citizens. It will, as usual, protect the interests of the very wealthy in Irish society and will further enrich landlords, in particular. It would be a fair, short description of this budget to refer to it as a landlord's budget. Incredibly, there are more giveaways to landlords who have effectively been profiteering from the worst housing crisis in the history of the State. Rents have gone through the roof and record numbers of people have been made homeless. Yet, quite a few of the significant measures in this budget involve further giveaways to landlords. It is quite extraordinary.

Before I move on to those details, it is very important to try to puncture much of the narrative that Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil have tried to create around this budget. There has been a sort of conjurer's trick whereby they have tried to narrow the discussion to an illusion called the fiscal space. The entire budget debate becomes about how we divvy up a miserable €1 billion. This is against a background where the same Government crows about record economic growth rates and talks about Ireland being the fastest growing economy in the whole of Europe.

The contradiction between the rhetoric about the success of recovery and the wonders of economic growth all gets narrowed down into a miserable debate about how we share out the crumbs. It points to the conjurer's trick in which the Government is engaged. It is trying to hypnotise people with a discussion about the fiscal space while the real issue is the untaxed wealth of a tiny minority of corporate and financial giants and a super wealthy elite which the Government refuses to touch but instead protects and insulates.

Thankfully, in trying to explain this point, we now have to refer to Apple and the €13 billion that the State does not want. It will tool up with lawyers to make sure we do not get the money. When it comes to a budget in which we urgently need major investment in housing, health, education and in developing strategic sectors of our economy and to deal with chronic poverty, low pay and inequality, we only have €1 billion. We do not want €13 billion; we only have €1 billion to discuss in the so-called fiscal space.

It is as though we will not talk about what lies behind the €13 billion figure, which is only the tip of a very large iceberg.

That is what People Before Profit and the Anti-Austerity Alliance have tried to allude to in our pre-budget statement. Of course, when we have tried to do the same over recent years for successive budgets, the standard response of the Government, Fianna Fáil and Labour has been to talk about fantasy economics. That is nonsense. They say that there is no pot of gold. They say that we only have this miserable little bit of fiscal space. They say that there are not these billions of euro that we talk about to use to address substantially and radically the inequalities and problems in our society and public services. Surprise surprise, who comes to confirm our version of events? Only the EU with the Apple ruling in disclosing that one company alone owes the State €13 billion in tax and that the State colluded with this company in order to ensure that it did not pay that tax. In our budget statement, in our argument to the Government and, more importantly, to the people out there, we say to break through this nonsense and begin to go after the money that these corporations are dodging in tax.

The untold story of the last number of years is that while the incomes of ordinary people were slashed to a degree of 15% to 20%, our health budget lost €3 billion, the public sector lost 30,000 workers, education and disability funding was cut and we managed to engineer the worst housing crisis in the history of the State, in almost every single one of those years corporate profits jumped, and jumped significantly. That is the elephant in the room that needs to be addressed. That is what we seek to address in this budget debate and in our alternative budget statement. One can add to that the odious debt that we are forking out. We will pay €6 billion again next year. Last year, it was €6 billion and it was €7 billion the year before that. Let us not talk about that. We can only afford €1 billion for everybody and everything, but we can afford to pay out €6 billion on a debt that resulted from the greed and gambling of a corporate elite in this country.

We cannot talk about the €8.6 billion in cash held by NAMA and the strategic investment fund. Even if we talk about it, we cannot spend it because of the insane fiscal rules. We are not allowed to spend money we actually have to deal with the housing crisis, health, education and the likes of the arts, forestry and child care. I will go on to talk about the details of some of these things. We do not talk about that. This money is literally being given away. That speaks to a wider trend of the cumulative effect of establishment-type budgets of this sort, of the way the Government has reacted to the economic crisis and of the neo-liberal policies the Government has pursued for the best part of 20 or 25 years variously between Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and Labour, which have seen an ongoing and dramatic transfer of wealth from the have-nots to the haves. The top 10% has gone from having 34% of all income to now having 39% of income. That same top 10% has received 50% of the benefit of the increase in total income of €21 billion. In wealth, the transfer is even more dramatic with the top 10% previously having had 42% of the wealth of this country - itself an obscene figure - and now having 52% of the wealth. Meanwhile, the bottom 50% of the population - the bottom half - has only 5%. These are extraordinary levels of inequality. There is nothing being done about that. Instead, there is a continuous transfer of wealth to that ever-richer minority at the top of Irish society.

That brings me to some of the details in this budget. I do not know if some of the things fully come out, but this is the cost of not looking to tax the corporations, the wealthy, the high income earners, the financial speculators in the IFSC and continuing to pay out billions of euro in interest on odious debt. The arts were cut, again, by 16%. That is a €30 million cut in the arts budget. I do not know if anybody has even referred to that. It is absolutely disgraceful. After the debate we had in this House only a few weeks ago just before the summer break about the importance of arts in which people waxed lyrical about the role of our culture and heritage, of its economic value and its intrinsic value in itself, we cut the arts budget by 16%. It is absolutely outrageous. The budget for the Irish language has been cut by 9%. So much for our concern for our own heritage. The budget for sports has been cut by 17% in a total cut of €21 million. The budget for local government, which was supposed to receive extra resources as a result of the local property tax, was cut by 70%. That is a €30 million cut in the local government budget.

I was out supporting librarians in my own area recently where they were protesting the fact that there are moves on to have libraries run by machines rather than the human beings and librarians who are trained to help the young people, the disabled, the elderly and so on who come into them. They are being replaced by machines and it seems that now justifies a cut in the money that goes to local government and the local services on which people depend. That is the reality of this budget if the Government confines itself to this miserable, neo-liberal fiscal space which is nothing other than a straitjacket designed, on the one hand, to force us into repaying these bondholders and bankers who wrecked this economy and, on the other hand, to be used essentially as a tool to force us to privatise and run down public services to the benefit of private interests, the private sector, private developers and so on. These people want to move in on these areas, take them over, profit from them and, as in the case of the housing crisis, actually to benefit and profiteer from the misery of human beings who are turfed onto the street or who are waiting for 13, 15 or 16 years on a housing list.

That brings me on to the specifics of housing and the much-crowed about €1.2 billion in housing. What a load of nonsense. What is the reality when one looks at the actual details of the housing proposals? We are going to get 1,500 direct build council houses next year. That is in the budget books: 1,500. Let us put that in context. There is a housing list of nearly 160,000. In my constituency of Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown alone, there are more than 6,000 people on the list. The entire new build of local authority housing next year would not even cut by half the housing list in my area - in one area. That is how bad it is. It is absolutely pathetic. Where is the money going? Again, it is in the book. There is €100 million under housing assistance payments going to private landlords. There is €137 million under the rental accommodation scheme going to private landlords. There is €200 million in infrastructure grants going to private developers and landlords supposedly to encourage them to provide affordable housing. There is going to be public land handed over to these private landlords and private interests, as is happening already in the case of O'Devaney Gardens. It is as if we did not learn from the disaster of what happened with Bernard McNamara and these same public private partnerships, in that these people will pull the plug on these developments if there is not enough profit in it for them. Yet, the Government wants to go down the same road again.

As I stated to the Minister the other day, and it is now confirmed with this budget, with the roll-out of the housing assistance payment, HAP, scheme there will be an exponential growth in the amount of public money, year-on-year, going to private landlords. That is confirmed by the fact that the majority of next year's budget is going out in payments to private landlords. The HAP scheme, rental accommodation scheme, infrastructure grants and - lest we forget it - rent allowance continues to put money into the pockets of private landlords. The whole country will only get 1,500 social housing units and not even all of those will be local authority units. It is shocking. Despite all the rhetoric, what is going is - I will not even say it is a stealth privatisation, it is staring us in the face - the wholesale privatisation of the housing sector and our public land, and we are paying for it. It is disgraceful.

Then we look at the health system. People are waiting in chronic pain for two years on a waiting list to get hips replaced. They are waiting for hours and days on trolleys in hospitals. There has been a complete failure to resource mental health services and implement A Vision for Change. This policy has been agreed for years but it has never been resourced or staffed. Then we have the scandal relating to home care packages. I spoke on two occasions in this House about Mr. William O'Brien - it is useful to humanise this issue by referring to this man - who has been looking for a home care package for his son. His son has a very serious disease. This old man is looking to be the carer for his own son, but he cannot get the home carer package despite the need having been accepted.

What do we get? After we take out the cost of standing still, the cost of demographic changes and the effect of the Lansdowne Road agreement, there will be only a few hundred extra million euro for the health service. Almost the whole lot of it will be eaten up by the increase in demographic pressures and by the Lansdowne Road agreement. The cumulative effect on A Vision for Change is nothing. If we look in the document, we will find nothing. There is no extra money for A Vision for Change. There will be an extra 950 home care packages. This is to be set against a background where - as is the case for William O'Brien and presumably many others like him - we have been told since May of this year that the budget was used up. We have had approximately 2 million home care hours cut from the system since 2009. In 2009, 55,000 people were getting home care packages, but the figure was cut to 47,000. Now we are getting an extra 950 packages. This will not go anywhere near meeting the desperate need of people who need these packages. It is pathetic.

There is virtually no provision for disability services. A miserable €21 million is provided for but more was sought. Senator John Dolan has already stated what a disgraceful disappointment the budget is in terms of addressing the desperate needs of those with disabilities. These people have been hammered as a result of the cuts in recent years and were always short-changed, under-resourced and lacked the supports they deserved. There is nothing substantial provided for them.

An extra €5 per week has been allowed for pensioners and other social welfare recipients, but here is the rub. Every single category of social protection recipient, except the pensioners who are the one exception, will still be worse off next year than they were in 2009. That is how bad it is. Eight years after the crash and the beginning of the austerity assault on people's supports and incomes, the poorest and most vulnerable will be getting less following this so-called give-back budget than they were getting in 2009 despite living in the fastest growing, most successful economy in the world. It is pathetic. Of course, the cost of living has gone up during that time on a number of fronts and the cost of accommodation has gone out of control.

Those in receipt of disability allowance, lone parents and jobseekers, who were on €204 per week in 2009 will, despite the increase, be on only €193 per week and carers, who were on €220 per week in 2009, will be on only €209 per week. As if that is not bad enough, it is even worse for young people. Those aged between 18 and 21 years, after the increases, will be on €102 per week when they were on €204 per week in 2009. It is similar for those aged 21 to 24 years. Those aged 25 years, who were on €204 per week in 2009, will receive €147 and those aged 26 years, who were on €204 per week in 2009, will receive only €193. This is not progressive, equality budgeting. There has been no targeting of those who suffer disproportionately from poverty and deprivation, the figures for which have increased exponentially. There has been no targeting of those who are suffering poverty and deprivation. The €5 increase - which the Government is crowing about - masks the fact that it does nothing at all to address the deprivation and inequality that has grown substantially over that period.

The plans on child care have been much trumpeted. We will have to examine the details and the Minister, Deputy Zappone, will address the House on them later. There may be something in it. However, it is significant that the overall allocation for the Minister's Department in 2017 is more or less the same as the allocation in the 2016 budget. There is only a marginal difference. This tells me that there is not much extra money available. It begs the question, will people benefit from it in any significant way? It is possibly explained by the fact that it will not be implemented until September of next year. Therefore, when one examines the figures, the money does not seem to be there for one of the big, headline measures in the budget, which is about child care. It certainly is not there in 2017. Perhaps it will be there in September. We will see.

Yesterday I spoke to a child care provider, who told me that even if the money was there it would not be possible to accommodate the demand. Even if people get the support, child care providers will not be able to accommodate the demand because they cannot get the child care workers to provide the child care. The reason they cannot get them is the pay levels are miserable, the work is part-time, because the work is only available during term time, and no one wants to do the job. Unless there is investment in creating a proper, publicly funded, national child care service, as we have proposed and provided for in our alternative budget, it is doubtful that the Government will be able to deliver the child care services it speaks about to those who need it.

There is no mention of the need to address the pupil-teacher ratio and class sizes. To paraphrase my comrade, when one examines the details, there are more holes in the Government's budget than there are in a Swiss cheese. However, it is not funny when we consider how serious and urgent are the problems.

This is the consequence of operating within crazy fiscal rules that limit us to fighting over crumbs, namely, the €1 billion we can share out, while leaving untouched the tens of billions of euro in corporate profits. Since the 1990s, gross corporate profit has increased from approximately €50 billion to approximately €80 billion per annum. Corporations are paying 6% or 7% on their profits, rather than the 12.5% rate. Moreover, they pay this on the profit is on their books, while tax is evaded off the books through the double Irish mechanism. Companies will be able to avail of the double Irish until 2020 because the Government has still not closed down.

Rather than move on the scandal of corporate tax evasion, we were given a little sop. We have championed this issue in the House where it was not raised until the left got people elected. Ireland is an offshore European tax haven. The Minister of State, Deputy Pat Breen, may smile but that is the view of every other country and jurisdiction. I understand Brazil recently included Ireland on its list of tax havens and rogue tax jurisdictions. As the ruling in the Apple case confirmed, Ireland is a tax haven.

The big, dirty secret behind this budget and previous budgets is that Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Labour Party in government worked together to protect corporate interests, introduced more tax breaks to benefit them and allowed them to get away with even more tax evasion. If we made corporations pay their taxes and imposed a financial transactions tax, we would have the money needed to transform society and provide direct public investment to deliver the tens of thousands of council houses we need. We would have the investment required to develop a universal national health service and an education system with class sizes on a par with other European countries, as opposed to having among the most overcrowded classrooms in the western world. We would have the money to treat people with disabilities in a dignified way and give them the rights they are entitled to and deserve. We would not have to discriminate against young people and drive young educated university graduates from the country in record numbers. Last year, more university graduates left the country than in any other year in the history of the State. The Minister of State may shake his head all he likes but that is a fact, as any young nurse or teacher he chooses to speak to will tell him.

We would also have money to invest if the Government adopted our proposal of introducing a tax on landlords. Having made a fortune from rocketing rents in recent years and profiteering from the misery of others, landlords should be made to pay a little. Why are they being offered tax breaks instead of paying tax when we know they are making a fortune? We propose a modest tax on landlords which would allow us to abolish the property tax on the family homes of ordinary people who cannot afford to pay it. Under our proposal, landlords would pay approximately €1,000 on each of their properties.

Similarly, a financial transactions tax would cover the cost of abolishing water charges. Despite the vast majority of people making clear they want water charges removed and the Oireachtas being given a democratic mandate to remove them, the Government did not included in the budget a measure to abolish water charges and the property tax. It should introduce progressive taxes to redistribute wealth in a fairer manner and develop a sustainable economy that is not dependent on the whims of tax evading multinational corporations. Such dependence is the result of a dangerous strategy. We should have learned from our excessive dependence on the property sector before 2008 how dangerous it is to put all our eggs in one basket. This is what the Government is doing by luring foreign direct investment, multinational corporations and, incredibly, developers and landlords and it is an accident waiting to happen.

We have proposed a sustainable alternative that would make a difference and insulate us from the ups and downs of a global market that is in serious trouble, as anyone seriously examining developments in the international economy is aware.

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