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

The budget has missed an opportunity. Thank God we are in the situation of having a balanced budget and the ability to introduce additional expenditure and tax measures. However, the budget has introduced a range of small measures with no vision, purpose or sense of anything being done differently. Some measures are to be welcomed. It is very welcome that the idea of my colleague, Deputy Catherine Martin, regarding improving the lot of parents with premature babies has been followed through. There are many similar examples. I welcome the belated change of tack on a vacant sites levy. My party colleague, Senator Grace O'Sullivan, proposed such a measure in February. Unfortunately, her proposal was voted down by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael but it has now been announced in the budget. The Green Party would go further in that regard and apply a similar levy to a range of other sites to threaten the property industry with a stick instead of just giving it carrots. We could pick out aspects of many similar measures that would be welcomed by any ordinary person. However, the lack of change or sense of new direction is disappointing and particularly so because the current environment would allow for that.

We are lucky to have a balanced budget in view of the events of recent years. I am a member of the Committee on Budgetary Oversight and it was told that because interest rates are at an historic low, our debt repayments are in the order of €3 billion less than was expected three or four years ago. As is said in the finer detail of the budget papers that are worth reading through, we have about €400 million extra this year because, thankfully, the jobless figure is reducing. What is being saved in unemployment benefits is giving us a €400 million boost. Only the dark artists of economic science could explain the Central Bank balance sheet but there has been a bumper allocation of €1 billion plus per year from the Central Bank to the Exchequer because of the vagaries of bond markets, promissory notes and so on. A series of very beneficial aids has put us in the situation of having a little bit of wiggle room and a little bit of room to be creative, imaginative, set a course and do things differently. It is greatly disappointing that was not done. There are many incremental changes in the budget but nothing really different. There is no sense of a Government with a vision or plan or Departments that are keen as mustard to get many things done. The budget is of a deeply conservative nature.

I wish to highlight areas where a sense of direction or change could have been shown. These areas may have been raised at the Committee on Budgetary Oversight but they are worth repeating. I was deeply shocked at the budget content in relation to climate change because not only was there a lack of vision or direction, but there was nothing of any substance. That is particularly shocking because the Minister for Communications, Climate Action and Environment, Deputy Naughten, is due to attend a Council meeting in the coming days at which our European colleagues will tell him that the rules will be applied and Ireland will face fines of €500 million to €800 million per year in three or four years' time. The only counter-argument the Minister raised during a discussion of this matter at a meeting of the Joint Committee on Communications, Climate Action and Environment on 5 October was that he could ask them not to apply the fines but to give Ireland some time and allow it to spend the money that would have gone to paying the fines on reducing emissions. If that is to be the case, the budget should have put €600 million into mitigating climate emissions but it did nothing in that regard. There are dribs and drabs and bits and bobs but nothing of any real scale or ambition.

In terms of transport, I spoke briefly today to the Minister for Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, Deputy Humphreys. She told me she left her home at 6.30 a.m. this morning and was stuck on the M1 coming in by the airport for hours. Last week, it took Deputy Stanley three hours to get from Portlaoise to Dublin. We are facing absolute and utter gridlock and there is nothing in the transport budget that shows any way of addressing that existential crisis not only of emissions, but also our economic future and stability. No rail-based public transport project is ready to go. All the money being spent on motorways, additional roads and so on will not solve the fundamental problem of our cities being gridlocked and having no way into them. No more roads can be built to fix that. There is no more room on the M50 and no more lanes can be added nor any more spaghetti junctions attached to the Red Cow roundabout or the magic roundabout. We have to invest in public transport but there is no provision for it in the budget.

We have to invest in cycling. Some €3 million has been allocated to cycling. That would pay for approximately 50 m of motorway. People are crying out for investment in cycling because we know it can work. It can tackle gridlock, it is a good way to reduce emissions and to create safe cities. It would also reduce the health bill because there would not be as many obese children and adults. However, there is no provision for this in the budget. We have been prepping the Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport, Deputy Ross, so that he can be a champ in this regard and we have been showing him various schemes he could pursue. In spite of that, nothing is being done.

There is a similar lack of ambition in regard to energy. Farmers have been given a tax break for putting in solar panels. As it is a Fine Gael-led Government, it is not surprising that farmers have been given a tax break. We should be putting solar panels on the roofs of schools and public buildings. Why has €20 million not been allocated for the State to lead the solar revolution and take a punt on putting solar panels on the roofs of its buildings? There is nothing in the budget about developing offshore energy even though other countries are doing so on a large scale, and that is the future. This budget shows no ambition. There is a welcome increase in energy efficiency but nothing of the scale we need.

Some €10 million has been allocated to electric vehicles. If we were really serious about making Ireland a leading country for the development of electric vehicles, we would be setting aside €50 million next year for public charging stations across the country so that people who buy electric vehicles would know for sure they would be able to charge them. We would resolve to be really good at this. All the car companies are making the cars and they will be available from January onwards and the State should row in with that. Instead, the Minister, Deputy Ross, will tomorrow come out with some half-baked half measure with no scale of ambition.

It is the same in regard to agriculture. There is not a single word about forestry in all the budget papers I have read, the fine print of which I have been going through. It is as if we were a leader in terms of reducing emissions.

We have managed to reduce our emissions. According to the latest predictions, by 2020 we will have reduced our emissions to approximately 4% below our 2005 level, whereas we should be 20% down. One way we could address this is through a massive increase in forestry, which would create employment and, if we did it right, create a better environment and more biodiversity. There is nothing in the budget to this effect. The Government is spending money, giving Bord Bia €4 million to advertise Ireland as a great green country, but there is nothing about reopening the organic agriculture scheme. This would not cost huge amounts of money, but there was a demand for it at the National Ploughing Championships recently. One farmer after another came up to me and, realising this is where there is a better profit and better farming, asked whether there was any chance the organic scheme could be reopened. I said the Government would surely reopen it as part of the budget. However, there is nothing here in that regard other than marketing how green we are but doing nothing about it.

There is nothing about the National Parks and Wildlife Service. We are advertising Origin Green with videos everywhere about what a great country we have and how the landscape is brilliant, but the National Parks and Wildlife Service is on its knees. It does not have the staff to do anything. This can be seen in Killarney National Park and everywhere else. The National Parks and Wildlife Service just does not have the resources to manage our land or to protect biodiversity, and it is not as if biodiversity and the fact that we have lost half our natural wildlife in the past 40 or 50 years is a small issue. However, there is nothing in the budget about this area. There is not a green bone in this budget.

I will focus my comments on things I would do differently for a moment. The prospect of change is also a change away from everything being just about the economy, the market and business. That is what this country is - the business country. We could and should be something slightly broader. The idea that the market knows best came about in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It was the central orthodoxy for 30 or 40 years until the economic crash. It is no longer credible because the self-destruct button in that capitalist market system became apparent. We are coming out of the crash and the emergency measures and we have a little room to manoeuvre. This was a chance for us to decide it is not all just about economic growth, that we stand as a country for something more than just keeping 5% economic growth going all the time, and that there are other measures of wealth and welfare. This starts first and foremost with something called caring work, which may not be in the paid economy but which deserves to be recognised. We have not given those women - they are mainly women, which is perhaps why they are not looked after - who spent their lives working at home the pension break we had hoped they would be given this time when we had money to give.

There is a whole section of our society who decide they do not want to be in the paid economy for a period. Fine Gael does not care about them. That is what this budget says. The Minister said that we must get everyone into the workforce. He said this in plain English, but I do not agree. We need a balance. We need to help people in the workforce, but that does not mean we completely ignore and devalue those people who decide they want to step aside from the paid market economy for a period because they have other critical work to do.

I had also hoped in some ways the budget would target supports for younger people. We are not giving a message to younger people that they are really valued. It is great that the Government is to increase everyone's social welfare payments, but could it not have given something slightly more to those under 26? To leave them on €107 a week is just not fair or right, and it is not as if they would suddenly all be skiving off if the payment were increased. It is just that for some young people, for a certain period, it may make sense to be on the dole. They may be trying to be young musicians or young artists or trying to get their heads together and work out what they want to do. I just regret that we did not use this opportunity to be strategic and decide to look after this category.

The same could be said of investment in mental health services. We should give some hopeful messages, a sense of something other than just keeping the economy going and it being all about business, the economy, the property market and the agrifood sector. The budget is full of how we will keep selling beef to the Arabs and keep the whole economic system going. I wish it had said something more than that to me.

We also need to be competitive. The budget does not say anything about the evolving digital economy. There is not a single word here about how we will use the new digital revolution that is taking place to be efficient in everything we do, including in our public services. Everyone here is welcoming another 800 gardaí and another 500 ancillary staff and so on without having worked out what in God's name our Garda Síochána will be doing with them and how it uses digital services and information technology. We could have told the Garda that if it gets its act together, turns the force around and gets reform really rocking in the Garda and uses digital technology effectively, then we will give it the extra staff if it needs it. Instead, it is just Fine Gael looking after the boys in blue again because that is what Fine Gael does. There is no reform. This goes across the whole range of this budget process.

I welcome some of the other measures. I welcome the fact that additional funding is to go to third level education, although we in the Green Party are uncertain as to how this will actually apply in that the training fund, as I understand it, does not easily transfer into third level university funding. We need to take money from the business sector to pay for third level education, rather than the student paying the entire bill, but I would hate to see this at the cost of the research freedom, intellectual freedom and teaching freedom of our universities. We need to be top of the class and seen as best in the world for universities. I do not see MIT, Harvard, Oxford or Cambridge saying they are becoming training institutions, so I would be very keen to see what exactly this means.

Regarding housing, and again, to talk about doing things differently, everyone welcomes the money being put into housing, but why is it - this has been said by several Deputies - that the Government is stalling at the jump at the fence and saying it will introduce a new form of affordable housing? The idea I was really interested in was cost-rental affordable housing, whereby the local authority or housing association is able to borrow long term and square that off against revenues it would generate and which are close to market rents. If someone cannot afford it, rather than subsidising the private rental sector, which is what we are doing at present, we would subsidise that local authority or housing association project, or the tenant within that project. The great advantage of this is that it gets it off the Government balance sheet. As I understand it, the Austrians and others have done this without it going onto their government borrowing, so it should have been possible for us to ramp up social and affordable housing using such a mechanism. The other advantage is that one gets a much more diverse housing and social housing mix and it brings the local authorities back in. It also irons out many of the inequities in our current social housing system, which is in need of reform. It is not as if everything is fine with the current system. However, there is nothing about this in the budget.

This budget is just the same as previous budgets. It is a return to the early 2000s. The Minister is right that we do not have the madness of that period, when our budget was growing at 12% per annum, but it is the same thing. We are experiencing growth of 4% or 5% per annum but pretty much exactly in the same way as in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the height of the Celtic tiger years. That is what we seem to want to go back to, which is not good enough. The various papers accompanying the budget say this. The economic and fiscal outlook document states that we need to lay down a solid economic foundation to help deliver steady and sustained improvements in living standards in a rapidly changing world. It refers to a rapidly changing global economic environment which generates significant opportunities for a flexible, dynamic economy such as Ireland's economy. Even if one wants to look purely at the economic approach, what I am suggesting would deliver a better economic future rather than just keeping everything in the same conservative model that Fine Gael and the Independent Alliance, with the assistance of Fianna Fáil, are implementing. We should decide to make a statement, to go for the clean energy revolution, to be leaders in the digital revolution that is also taking place and to be at the centre of a transport revolution which aims to improve urban space, bringing life back to the centre. This budget leaves me with a real fear that we will now go into a national capital plan and national planning framework based on the same conservative thinking we have seen in the budget.

Instead of that being an opportunity for really rethinking and restructuring where we are going as a society, not just an economy, I fear that what this budget signals is a capital review plan and a planning framework which is as conservative as this budget has been. That would be a real mistake. It does not say anything. I asked a colleague earlier this morning and he said it was "cromulent". I asked what that meant and he said it does not mean anything. That is the sense I get from this budget. There are lots of small measures, lots of different changes, but nothing that is really changing the direction of this State or this society.

Last but not least, I want to go back to values. I wish we were starting to experiment in budgets, not just to have a blanket one-size-fits-all. One of the ideas we had was to propose a basic income model of social welfare. We have to €20 billion to spend and we saved €400 million this year by having a lower social welfare bill. Could we not have used even €10 million of that to ask towns to bid into a scheme where we would apply basic income in, say, six towns? This could be done in a radical way whereby we would give every person €200 a week and then measure and test what effect this would have on a town. Part of what we need in the national planning framework is a revitalisation of towns across the country. We need experimentation and a willingness to do things differently and to be flexible, innovative and dynamic, everything the Department says it wants to be but which is not in this budget.

To go back again to values, the Taoiseach says we have to centre Ireland in the world. I agree, and I think that is a very good approach in terms of how we think about ourselves. We have made the decision we are going to be global internationalists, co-operative and peace-keeping - that is what we do, that is what we are, and that is what raises our spirits. I was utterly depressed today when I saw what the Minister himself admitted was a modest increase of €13 million in overseas development aid. I am sorry, but it was not a modest increase; it was a disastrous decision. What it means is that we are ensuring a continuing decrease in the overall percentage we give in overseas aid. Instead of going towards the goal we should be going towards, which is 0.7% of GDP, we are going further away again in this budget.

That is not unimportant. Our success economically will not be by being seen as a tax haven for Apple. It will be by being seen as a responsible part of the global system and by playing our part on international justice, and in that way helping with migration and some of the other difficulties we have. To give so little in an increase in overseas development aid was a signal which will perhaps not make the headlines and is not hurting anyone immediately, and no one will lose a vote for it, but in my mind it said everything that was wrong about this budget. It did not have the big heart, big ambition or big ideas as to what we could be.

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