Tommy Broughan (Dublin Bay North, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I mentioned housing and we need to ramp up the construction of social housing by at least 10,000 units per year. In the alternative budget that I submitted, I spoke about having an additional €1 billion for housing this year and every year until 2021 or until we get rid of the horrendous experiences being suffered by people in the city tonight. With regard to transport, we speak of metro north and we were meant to be hopping on metro north in 2026. Perhaps we could do with it in 2021 or 2022, particularly with the expansion of the airport and so on. With education and health, we are just keeping up with demographics, so we need major development.

We heard some worrying aspects of this at the budget committee meetings. The rainy day fund is a great idea and we had it before with McCreevy's money but, unfortunately, it went into the banks. It seems we will have a rainy day fund and yet we are skimping on investment. In particular, there is a new debt figure formulated by the Minister's colleague, the Minister for Finance, Deputy Noonan, when he said we must hit the 45% debt-to-GDP ratio. Why on earth would we do that when we desperately need housing, transport and so on?

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