Alan Kelly (Tipperary, Labour) | Oireachtas source

-----but in all seriousness, that will be wiped away by the additional costs of living that we all know about. For people with children, because of the excessive costs associated with them, and those living in the Dublin conurbation who commute into the city, this is a negative budget. The tax, including income tax, changes make it a regressive budget; these are regressive moves. The changes to the tax band thresholds and the USC rates mean that the more somebody earns, the more he or she will benefit. Those on lower incomes will lose out. The budget is regressive in its stance.

It is also over-reliant on commercial stamp duty. We are going back to the bad old days. I do not say that every Fianna Fáil colleague was aligned to Mr. McCreevy but this is a Charlie McCreevy cup of coffee budget because there is an over-reliance on property taxes again. How sustainable is that? How sustainable was that in the past? Is any Member worried about where we are going? I include my Fianna Fáil colleagues because many of them have acknowledged and stated that we cannot go back to that. However, that is where we are going because there is no guarantee that areas for which funding has been announced as a consequence of the €400 million that is projected to come in from this will be sustainable. We do not know if every plan that has been announced across education, health, housing and social welfare up to 2022 will happen because we do not know if this package is sustainable. That is very bad planning.

The budgetary process is frankly a joke. There is not a budgetary process that is real. We have had revelations in the House that the Minister for Finance shared documentation, and had discussions, with one other spokesperson on finance. He did not speak to our finance spokesperson in the same way and, therefore, the Minister is engaged in selective briefing. The complete budget was in the media over a week ago, with one or two small measures emerging in the past few days. That is not acceptable from a Government, it is not acceptable for the Parliament and it is insulting to every Member. God be with the days when a certain junior Minister was fired for a relatively minor indiscretion in comparison to what has gone on over the past two budgets. It is incredible, and it is not the way to do business. It is not appropriate for the country, it is not appropriate for the Houses of the Oireachtas and it is not an appropriate way for the Government to behave. Please change it the next time around.

When it comes to a number of decisions the Government made on tax issues, I welcome the Brexit trade adjustment fund, which is a Labour Party proposal. I am glad that our former colleagues in government listened to us on that.

When it comes to health care, I spent 11 months on the Committee on the Future of Healthcare. It proposed a good compromise with a ten-year programme of work. It is now over. The Dáil approved the programme 100%; there was no dissenting voice. I cannot stand new politics and I do not believe in it. However, if new politics delivered one thing, it was that we got together to say we would take the politics out of health care. We spent 11 months doing that and put a programme together to which everyone signed up but now it is in the bin because the Sláintecare implementation plan has not been funded as part of the budget. The early years of the programme require less funding. The funding ramps up year on year because that is the nature of it. If year one has not been funded, what hope is there for the implementation of the programme? That is a huge disappointment given transitional funding of €155 million was required. I am a huge supporter of ehealth. We cannot transform our health services without modernising its IT systems. That is not provided for. I acknowledge the funding for mental health services but how it will be used and actioned is a different issue. There have been funding announcements for diagnostics, primary care and community care under the implementation plan but legacy issues that require funding were also identified as part of Sláintecare and they have not been dealt with, nor have inpatient charges or dental treatment. There will be - we have seen the reports - a catastrophe in respect of dental hygiene if we do not return to a proper programme of dental care. This is another issue that has not been dealt with.

Recently, there were 500 people on trolleys and over 700,000 people on various waiting lists for different procedures. Unfortunately, this budget is very shy when it comes to the provision of funding for disabilities, despite there being a Minister of State at the Department of Health, Deputy Finian McGrath, who talks a great deal about this. Can the Minister of State say when the Government will sign up to the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities? In May 2016 he said it would be done in six months and that he would ensure it would happen. It still has not happened. If we do sign up to it, that will obviously have implications as well.

I welcome the 1,800 front-line staff being put in place across the health care sector. The issue is whether we will be able to source them and if programmes are in place to ensure that we get them. Of course, all the funding put forward in this budget for health care ignores a massive elephant in the room, the general practitioner, GP, contract that must be renegotiated and the costs associated with it. Those costs will be high, so there is a huge contingency involved. What happens if the renegotiation is successful, and I hope it is? What area of this budget will suffer? The Minister never even mentioned Sláintecare. However, he spoke about an access plan. The provision for home care and home care packages is simply not enough. The funding he spoke about in respect of older people is contingent on there being services in the community for them. There is no need to tell many of the Deputies that those services simply do not exist, particularly in rural areas. How can one provide funding to get people into services that do not exist in light of the fact that the capital fund is primarily taken up by the children's hospital project? There is very little detail on other capital expenditure on primary or community care in the budget or in any of the documentation. The Government says it will provide funding to get elderly people into the right setting, but there is no funding to provide the settings. It is not going to happen, and we will be back in this House next year saying the same thing.

The National Treatment Purchase Fund is a short-term gain and a long-term loss. We are basically bailing out health service inefficiency and a system that is broken. I can understand people waiting for procedures needing the fund. If we do it for a couple of years in a row, so be it. However, it is now becoming part of the system. That is unacceptable. It is really saying to management in the health service that it need not worry and that if it cannot deliver we will bail it out. That is unacceptable. I also seek a guarantee from the Minister, because I believe I have not been given the full story on this in the past, that there will be full funding for next year for the nine orphan drugs he has committed to bringing through the system to make them available to patients by November this year.

I am very disappointed with regard to child care. The wages of child care workers constitute a major issue and this is not addressed in the budget. Of course, it is not addressed because it would never be on the agenda of this Government in the first instance.

Will the Government stop telling lies by saying it is giving a €5 increase to everybody on social welfare payments across the board? If one uses a calculator, one will discover that the increase will amount to €3.85 in 2018. The increase is €3.85, not €5. That is a fact. Will the Government clarify if jobseekers under 26 years of age will get a pro ratapayment? I do not believe they will. I welcome the changes in respect of the national training fund and the levy that is being introduced. However, I am very concerned about the Minister's comment on employers' central role in this area in the future. Yes, they have a role but I am not sure that it is a central role.

I have no idea what the Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport, Deputy Ross, is doing in this Government, and I know from the Acting Chairman, Deputy Eugene Murphy's, face that he has no idea either.

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