Gerry Adams (Louth, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Yesterday, Fine Gael, the Minister for Finance and Fianna Fáil launched another budget that is lacking in vision and is devoid of ambition. This lack of vision is most clearly seen in the failure to tackle the crisis in our health service. The Taoiseach has hailed the health budget as the largest in the history of the State. He will know that the health service needs at least €691 million just to stand still. The Minister for Finance announced €685 million for health yesterday. That represents a net loss - a cut in effect - in anyone's language. The Government and its Fianna Fáil partners have chosen to leave our health service short of the money it needs to survive, never mind to improve. Approximately 680,000 citizens are already on hospital waiting lists. Almost 66,000 people spent time on trolleys in the first eight months of this year. That includes 2,216 people last week.

I am particularly drawn to the hard reality that citizens with disabilities, or their carers, will get little comfort from yesterday's budget. Have they no place in the Taoiseach's republic of opportunity? There is no commitment to increase personal assistance hours or respite care services. There is no funding for neuro-rehabilitation teams or transitional services. There is no mention of any new employment supports for citizens with disabilities. The Government has announced some modest benefits, including a €5 increase in disability allowance, which will not come into effect until March 2018.

Prior to the budget, Sinn Féin proposed a range of progressive measures, including 500 extra hospital beds, 2.1 million extra home help hours, 248,000 extra home care packages, 600 additional front-line staff in disability services and 500,000 additional personal assistance hours. We sent all these proposals to the Minister for Finance and his Government colleagues. They could have made these choices, but they decided not to. This budget was a real opportunity to send a message that the Government is on the side of ordinary citizens. Yesterday, it failed in a very spectacular way to seize that opportunity. It failed the citizens who depend on public services, especially our health services. It failed the homeless and citizens with disabilities and their carers. Last Wednesday, the Taoiseach promised that funding for citizens with disabilities "will have to form part of the budget and the Estimates process". He said he was sure the Government would "find additional funding for disability services next year", but it has not done that. Will the Taoiseach explain why 643,000 people with disabilities and their families have been left behind by the Government and its Fianna Fáil partners?

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