Micheál Martin (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

This is a modest budget that has been, by some distance, the most overspun in our history. It represents a significant step back from the Taoiseach's intended radical and regressive policies. It includes many individual items that are welcome and it conforms to the core agreement that budget policy must be sustainable and progressive.

However, there are also major gaps in this budget. It contains no coherent long-term economic strategy. It fails to address some essential issues. It is tokenistic and lopsided in preparing for the enormous economic and social threat of Brexit. Most of all, it will amount to nothing unless the Government starts to deal with the delivery gap, where there is increasingly less connection between what is announced and what is delivered.

Students of political history will remember that Commissioner Phil Hogan was once forced to resign as a Minister of State when his office mistakenly faxed a few budget headlines to a journalist an hour before the then Minister for Finance announced them to the Dáil. If this standard were still being applied, most of the Government, including the Taoiseach, would have resigned weeks ago.

It is genuinely remarkable how often the Taoiseach has leaked and commented on the budget in recent months. It is even more remarkable how different the budget is from his rhetoric. From the moment when he formally launched his bid for the Fine Gael leadership up to the past ten days, the Taoiseach set a particular tone for this budget. In speeches, interviews and innumerable leaks, he set out his overriding priority. This was the reorientation of budget policy away from the people he dismissed as caught in a culture of dependency and victimhood and towards the highest earners. Time and again, he and his Ministers announced that this was going to be a budget that returned to the Fine Gael core priority - tax cuts that would benefit the highest earners the most.

To back this up, they spoke out against a wide range of progressive social spending. Social protection payments were due to be held down. The Minister responsible even announced in August that pensioners would have to go back down the queue. The Taoiseach said that increases would be minimal, the health sector was told it would have to make do with what it had, and so on across nearly every public spending area.

The intention by our new Taoiseach to make a significant move to the right on budget policy is not an empty charge by the Opposition. It has been his core policy message for four months. To him, there is a group that is deserving of attention, and then there is everyone else, dismissed by him as caught in "a culture of dependency and victimhood". In a phrase that I hope he by now understands has caused immense anger, he has said that we should focus only on those "who get up early in the morning".

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