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

This is a budget of miserable crumbs which will do nothing to solve the most urgent social crises we face in this country - the disaster of housing and homelessness and the chaos in our public health system. This budget will do absolutely nothing to deal with the gaping, growing, obscene inequalities in the distribution of wealth and income in our society. One of the Minister, Deputy Donohoe's favourite phrases in recent days has been "prudence". He regularly tells us that is very important to be prudent. I feel like quoting the Beatles song of a similar title to him: "Dear Prudence open up your eyes." This budget has not opened up its eyes. It has not acknowledged or done anything to deal with the most serious issues facing the people who are suffering most and who most need the Government's help.

The most obvious example of this is the housing crisis. I do not know where to begin in expressing my anger and frustration at this budget when it comes to dealing with the housing and homelessness crisis. It simply beggars belief that in this budget there is only provision for 3,800 directly constructed council and approved housing body houses next year to deal with the scale of the crisis we now face. Some 3,800 houses is all that this Government can deliver next year for the 100,000 families on the housing list and the 8,000 people who are in emergency accommodation. It is just unbelievable. That announcement is nothing new. We heard that 3,800 figure after the so-called housing summit approximately a month ago. There was no additional funding beyond what was already announced. As was already pointed out by a number of speakers, the total amount of social and affordable housing, if refurbishments are included, is exactly the same as the figure in the Minister, Deputy Coveney's Rebuilding Ireland plan, which we all know has failed disastrously. There is no serious commitment to significantly increasing the amount of council housing directly provided to solve the crisis.

Instead an additional €150 million will go to housing assistance payments, HAPs. This is more money going into the pockets of private landlords. We also see a commitment to further expand this mad failed scheme to a further 80,000 to 90,000 households over the next three or four years so that, by 2021, we will be pouring €800 million to €1 billion into the pockets of private landlords. We will pay that money every year instead of putting it towards providing and building council houses for those who need them. Despite all the rhetoric about how the Minister wants to return to social housing, in actuality the central pillar of the plan to deal with this catastrophic housing crisis is to pour money into the pockets of private landlords. This is something which has failed and which has robbed the local authorities of the money they need, and should have, to build council houses.

There is also the matter of the local infrastructure housing activation fund, LIHAF, which is another scandal in the making. An additional €75 million of a subsidy will go to private developers, purportedly with the aim of getting back affordable housing. This is incredible. It is bad enough that the Minister came up with this scheme last year and allocated tens of millions to give to private developers, but the fact that he has expanded it this year really beggars belief because in the interim the developers have made it clear that they will not give us affordable housing for the subsidies they are to be given. In my area, Hines, the private developer to which NAMA sold the Cherrywood site, has said that it wants €300,000 to €400,000 or more for affordable houses. How will people afford those? The proportion of the overall development which will be made up of these unaffordable affordable houses will be miserable in any event. It could be as low as 1%, yet the Minister is going to give more money to this scheme. Is the Minister stark raving mad or is he just addicted to subsidising his private developer friends?

As if LIHAF and the HAPs were not bad enough, the Minister has come up with a new scheme to subsidise the private developers, which will be called home building finance Ireland. This is another agency with a convenient acronym, HBFI, which the Minister announced so proudly earlier. It will co-operate with NAMA to give cheap money to private developers who cannot get it off the banks which we bailed out, because those banks are only worried about the bottom line. Now that the banks which we bailed out will not lend money to the private developers, we the people will give them cheap loans so that they can build housing on the 800 different sites of public land which local authorities will hand over to them.

They will build on that land when they feel like it and then sell the houses back to the local authorities and make a profit on it. One could not make this stuff up. It is wholesale larceny of public land and money to enrich private developers, property speculators and landlords. We are paying again and again. The Mafia could not make this stuff up.

Meanwhile, the misery of human beings will continue. I will give the Minister of State and the House a newsflash on just how badly the housing crisis has escalated in the last couple of weeks. The first element of the crisis was people waiting for ten years on a housing list. Now it is up to 20 years. I got an email today from somebody who has been on the housing list for 20 years. As if that was not bad enough, families are being driven into emergency accommodation that is completely unsuitable for them or into hotels in appalling, overcrowded conditions. All of this we know.

The latest is that all the family emergency accommodation in Dublin is now full and all of the hotels are full. This is a new development in the last week or two. We were going to get people out of the hotels but we can forget that. People are lucky now to get a hotel. My office, with three members of staff, spent two days last week trying to source one hotel room for a young student who has two children. We could not get one. We could not find her a place. Then we had another student in the same position. This week, we came across a mother and father with five children, two of them toddlers and three at school, who have been in homeless accommodation for the past two months on a day-to-day basis. Every morning they are thrown out of their accommodation and they do not know where they are going to be that night. They spend the rest of the day trying telephone numbers where they cannot get an answer or are told by the hotels that they have no accommodation for them. The local authority can do nothing. The parents wait until 4.30 p.m., when it is possible to get through to Focus Ireland, which last night just about managed to get the family a room by 8 p.m. For the whole day, mum and dad and five kids are on the telephone just trying to get a room for one night. Tomorrow morning they will have to do it all over again, and the next day, and the next. That is what it has come to.

What has the Government offered to improve the situation? Not a single extra council house. No rent controls. A miserable extra €18 million to homelessness services that will not even begin to deal with the scale of the problem. It is absolutely shocking and unbelievable.

Then we come to the health service. There are 675,000 people who have been waiting for up to two years for operations for chronic pain and chronic conditions. They are suffering in pain. There are 514 people on hospital trolleys across the country today. What is on offer to them? Money that, according to the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation, INMO, will not even keep pace with the additional demands that will be placed on the health service next year because of a growing and aging population. The additional allocation is €215 million short of what the all-party Sláintecare committee, which included Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, stated was necessary for next year. That committee stated that to even begin to address the problems, we need an additional €900 million next year. What did we get from parties that signed off on that report? Only €685 million. Of course, there is always a boon in there for the private sector. There will be an extra €55 million for the private health care providers. They will make a profit out of the crisis. It is money diverted away from the public system to make more profit for those who profit out of the crisis in the health system. It is simply shocking.

The announcement of the additional 1,800 staff in the health service is fantasy. There has been no embargo on recruitment for the last couple of years at least, although there was one before that. The Government has been trying to recruit nurses and doctors but has not been able to do so because it will not pay them properly. It practices pay apartheid against young people coming out of college and university who have trained to be nurses. It expects them to do the same work as their colleagues but, over their lifetimes, to earn nearly €200,000 less than people who happened to qualify a few years earlier.

The Government has not restored pay levels for public sector workers. Even now, nine years after the crisis began, and even after this budget with the miserable increases the Government is throwing about, public sector workers will be earning less in 2018 than they were in 2008. That is the big story, not the little percentage increases that are being thrown about. Public sector workers will be earning less next year than they were ten years ago. Those unlucky enough to be new entrant teachers or nurses will be earning a lot less than that again. Added to that is the cost of accommodation. That is why the Government cannot and will not be able to recruit the nurses who are desperately need to deal with the trolley crisis and reopen the 1,000 beds, at least, that need to be reopened. Nurses are leaving the country in droves. Many young people who have trained as teachers are leaving, as are others in a whole number of areas.

On mental health we had an all-party seminar, which was very good. Fair play to the Ceann Comhairle for organising it. There was lots of lip-service paid on all sides of the House to the need to deal with mental health. However, when we actually get to the budget, an additional €35 million is going to mental health. What did the all-party Oireachtas committee recommend for next year's mental health spend? It was €122 million. Less than a third of what was recommended by all parties, including Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, is being allocated to mental health.

The Government is crowing about prescription charges being slightly reduced. In 2008, prescription charges were 50 cent and next year they will be €2. That is still €1.50 more than in 2008. In the drugs payment scheme, the Government has reduced the threshold from €144 to €134 - big deal. In 2008 it was €100. That mostly affects pensioners, the elderly and the chronically ill, who are still worse off than they were in 2008.

What about disability? There is no commitment of the additional resources necessary to make ratification of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, UNCRPD, a viable possibility. In any event, the Government will not even make a clear commitment to ratifying it but even if it had done so, there has been no serious additional allocation of funds. There is a miserable €15 million in the health budget for children with disabilities.

Welcome as it may be for children with disabilities, it still does not come anywhere near the necessary increase in cross-departmental expenditure in jobs, health, public transport and education. In its pre-budget submission, the Disability Federation of Ireland stated this increase should come to around €150 million. In reality, it would need to be more to even begin to move towards ratifying the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

There are the miserable crumbs of a €5 tax break for the average worker or an additional €5 for those getting social protection payments. Some of the case studies in the Budget Statement are completely disingenuous. For example, the case of the average public sector worker includes the Lansdowne Road agreement payments. If one strips out these payments, which were already committed to some time ago, some public sector workers will end up getting less net pay than what they got prior to the budget because of the increased tax they will have to pay. There is nothing in any way meaningful for workers in this increase.

The report on living standards of single parents showed 52% of lone parents are financially worse off than they were before the former Minister, Deputy Burton's, budgetary cuts or the so-called labour activation cuts. On the radio this morning, I heard the Minister for Employment and Social Protection, Deputy Regina Doherty, say there might have been a few problems on the edges of them, but fundamentally, they were a success in that they increased labour activation. I must point out to the Minister that, after this budget, a lone parent who works 20 hours a week will be €60 a week worse off than they were in 2012, when Deputy Burton made those infamous cuts attacking lone parents.

The former Fine Gael-Labour Party Government imposed the vicious cut of cutting in half young people's entitlements to jobseeker's allowance. Now they will get an extra €5. That is against payments, however, which were cut by 40% to 50% since 2012, driving many of young people out of the country, into poverty and deprivation or, in many cases, into homelessness.

Even for those who might be celebrating - I doubt anybody is however - the extra €5 will be wiped out by increases in bin charges, property taxes, utility bills and the public service obligation, as well as a 60% increase in motor insurance charges, increases in accident and emergency charges from €60 to €100 and inpatient overnight stay charges from €60 to €80. One can go on through the list. These miserable increases are all wiped out by these extra charges.

There is nothing on what the former Minister, now Taoiseach, promised on pension inequality suffered by 30,000 mostly female pensioners due to the changes to the bands made by the then Minister, Deputy Burton, in 2012 and the gap in the homemaker's scheme, which means they get lower pensions than others. This is a cohort which will grow. When the Taoiseach was Minister for Social Protection, he promised he would deal with it. He said it again recently in the Dáil but there is nothing in the Budget Statement to deal with this inequality for pensioners.

Child care was the big ticket item last year but has turned out to be a hoax. Do Members remember the allocation then? There was an allocation of €35 million for the single affordable child care scheme to start from September 2017. If €35 million was necessary to fund the scheme from September 2017 to the end of 2017, how can the additional funding for 2018 be only €20 million? It does not make any sense. To make it a year-round scheme based on last year's figures, it would have to three times €35 million, namely, €105 million. How is it going to be funded? It is not even going to happen because it is dependent on capacity in the private child care system, which does not exist, as well as on private child care providers being willing to provide the care, which they are not doing. Nothing has been done about the low pay or conditions for child care workers either. The point has not been made yet that the child care allocation does not add up to be sufficient, as I have calculated, to actually meet the promises made with a big fanfare last year on how we would deal with the extortionate and exorbitant costs of child care.

Marginal moves have been made on the pupil-teacher ratio. We are still, however, at the worst end of the European league tables for class sizes. We now get a miserable reduction in the pupil-teacher ratio but, again, it is dependent on the Government being able to recruit teachers when new entrants suffer pay inequality and pay apartheid. While there is a small increase in special needs assistants and special education teaching resources, it must be remembered that an additional 10,000 schoolchildren enter the school system every year. Accordingly, the additional teachers will be more than absorbed by the number of new students entering the education system.

Third level students got zero. Nothing will be done about the extortionate registration fees of €2,500 and €5,500 for a masters degree. Not a single extra cent will be given for student grants. How are students on these miserable grants supposed to be able to afford accommodation? If they do, it is tenement accommodation.

The €12 million extra to the arts is pathetic. That is still less than what we forked out in 2016 when we did a one-off increase in expenditure in the arts of an extra €50 million, which proved to be a success. It was reduced last year and this year, we still have not got up to the spend in 2016, which, in any event, is a miserable percentage when compared with the spend of our European counterparts. For a Government that often prides itself on jobs, it ignores the arts, an area in which we could create thousands of jobs if we invested seriously in the film industry, theatre, community arts and across the sector. We have talent in abundance in this sector with people working for nothing in many cases. If they were paid properly and if there was proper investment, we could generate a significant and sustainable domestic industry in all arts sectors.

The provision for dealing with climate change is, again, miserable. There is a few quid on the benefit-in-kind for company cars to switch over to electric cars, which will benefit private companies by the way. A few miserable extra quid is provided for the renewable energy incentive scheme. It is miserable compared with the scale of what is necessary if we are to avoid billions of euro in fines for our failure to meet climate change targets. Against a background where CO2 emissions are actually still increasing in Ireland and we have no chance of meeting reduction targets, this is pathetic. Where is the significant increase in investment in public transport? Where are the incentives for people to use public transport by cutting fares? As we suggested, cutting fares would not cost that much. If fares were cut by 50%, people would get out of their cars. Better still, if we made public transport free, people would certainly get out of their cars. To do that, the Government would have to increase the subvention to public transport significantly and to ramp up investment in public transport infrastructure.

There has been no sign of that being done.

Where is the increased investment in afforestation? There have been miserable levels of afforestation and a complete failure to meet the targets which suggest a minimum of 10,000 ha per year needs to be planted to deal with climate change and increase the overall level of forest cover, which would also create a lot of jobs. We are currently adding 6,000 ha per year but also cutting down trees too young for profit and, therefore, there may even be overall net deforestation. No extra money has been allocated to that.

People may say it would not be possible to implement all the measures I have mentioned and ask from where the money for them would come. The dirty hidden secret of the Irish economic story is that while the people get crumbs, profits have gone up by 100% since 2010. Household wealth has gone up by 50%. The CSO has confirmed that 53% of wealth is held by 10% of the population. It is a fact, not a slogan that the rich have gotten richer while the poor have been hammered or given crumbs. While the people get crumbs, the vulture funds, property developers and corporations run away with the bakery. The budget and the budget narrative that attempted to define this as being about a miserable little bit of fiscal space that the Minister, Deputy Donohoe, might be able to increase a little is like a conjuror's trick where we are concentrating on one hand while the other is busy robbing everything from us. In this case, the property developers, vulture funds and big corporations are doing the robbing while we are looking at the miserable crumbs of fiscal space.

As Deputy Paul Murphy outlined, if we considered taxing the bakery of wealth and profits in this country, we could get a lot of extra revenue to transform Irish society, deal with the housing and health crises and invest in education, infrastructure and arts. If corporations were made to pay 12.5%, an extra €6 billion would be raised on profits, which have doubled. Some €610 million would be raised if corporations paid a financial transaction tax. An additional €491 million would be made available if we got rid of the reduced VAT rate. An extra €1.4 billion would result from a slight increase in employers' PRSI. If the help-to-buy scheme were abolished, €40 million would be saved. If there were a tax on landlords, €400 million could be raised. If pension relief for high earners were cut, €115 million would be saved. I do not have time to go through the rest of the list. That is the hidden secret of the economic story: the rich making away with the bakery while the poor and the working people are thrown a few crumbs and are expected to be happy. We do not buy it.

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