Mary Lou McDonald (Dublin Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Speaking here in the Chamber yesterday, the Minister for Finance and for Public Expenditure and Reform told us that the budget 2018 announcements were a redoubling of efforts by the Government to rise to the challenges and respond to the risks of tomorrow. That is how he put it. If yesterday was good news, heaven protect us whenever there is bad news coming from the Government. Budget 2018 is the ultimate expression of political inertia and this inertia will cost the State and our people dearly for generations to come.

In his remarks, the Taoiseach said he is all about enabling people to plan for the future. Nothing could be further from the truth. As his budget amply demonstrates, Fine Gael not only tolerates the fundamental fractures in our society; it now actively seeks to normalise those deep inequalities. Children are being reared in emergency accommodation for years on end.

Home ownership is out of reach for an entire generation of young people and young working couples. Lone parents are denied the chance to build a stable environment and a better future for their children. Workers in the child care sector see no light at the end of the tunnel when it comes to their poor pay and conditions. Families are impoverished by child care costs which are equal to a second mortgage. Rural parents, who want their children to fulfil their potential, have no idea how they can afford to rent when their children attend university and, much less, how they might meet registration fees. Tens of thousands of renters are literally sick with worry at the thought of another rent hike which would make the roof over their heads unaffordable and might render them homeless.

For the avoidance of doubt, these are not people who want everything for free. On the contrary, these are the people who pay for everything. As a matter of fact, these are the people who pay the Taoiseach's generous wages, his allowances and the wages of his Cabinet members. These are the people, many of them who form 50% of the workforce, who earn €35,000 or less per annum. This is what they live on. If they are on fixed income for whatever reason, either through lack of work or ill-health, they have to live on modest sums, less than €200 a week in many cases. These people are wizards. How they manage to provide for themselves and their children should not be met with derision from the Taoiseach. It should win his admiration. God knows, they could teach many Members how to budget properly.

For those who pay for everything, they do not get to decide to forget about the basics, to neglect their children or not pay their basic bills. They know and understand that there are certain fundamentals in life which must be done and met. Rather than sneering at these individuals, the Government would do well to learn that lesson. In the case of public administration, public policy and good governance, one does not get to walk away from health and housing. One does not get to look the other way and leave thousands of people without a secure roof over their heads or to leave 700,000 people on medical waiting lists. One does not get to leave elderly people and others to the indignity of lying for hours, in some cases days, on hospital trolleys, if they are lucky. If they are not, they might be left sitting in a chair or, as it happened in my local hospital, left lying on the floor of the accident and emergency department. These are not people looking for anything for nothing. These are people who pay for everything. They are the people who have built and sustained this State.

Yesterday's budget was reckless. It was the worst expression of the politics of the past, despite all the ráiméis about new politics. Far from building the Taoiseach's republic of opportunity, he deliberately and wilfully thwarted the ambition of an entire generation. The social costs of this - emotionally, morally and financially - will be a great burden to the State for decades to come. The Taoiseach's Government is rudderless. It has been revealed that the emperor has no clothes. The Taoiseach is buck naked with no vision or ambition for our country or for our people.

It is no surprise that Fianna Fáil is with the Government every step of the way. Teachta Micheál Martin comes from the old stock of that party and he has imprinted his politics on all those in the ranks behind them. We had a double act yesterday of Deputies Michael McGrath and Calleary. One told us the Government's performance in housing and health was neither acceptable nor sustainable, while the other said that Fianna Fáil's participation in the confidence and supply agreement is delivering for people across the island - Janus-faced Fianna Fáil. This is the definition of the politics of yesterday. It is tired, cynical, dishonest and the reason we have crises in housing and health.

Fianna Fáil has historically looked to others to deliver public services. There was a time when it deferred to the church and its men in the mohair suits tipped their caps to the private sector. The rest is in part a sad and sorry history. Fianna Fáil and now Fine Gael are simply unable to think big, beyond their own political self-interest, or the next election. It is this limitation that has resulted in the deepening fractures in society, the fractures that Fine Gael and its coalition colleagues including Fianna Fáil refuse to sort out. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael sat around a table in advance of budget day and decided not to commit to build a single additional social affordable home. They decided the health service should be allowed to just stand still in 2018. The Independents in Government endorsed those decisions.

How these decisions can be described as delivering for people across the island, as Fianna Fáil would have us believe, is mind-boggling. When the spin is stripped away and the numbers exposed, the reality of the grand coalition's failures is there for all to see. The Minister for Finance told us yesterday that the Government would increase its ambition for social house builds in 2018. That is simply not true. The former housing Minister already announced the 2018 social housing allocation which means these moneys had already been factored into existing targets which remain unmet. The Government did not provide for a single additional unit beyond what has already been committed to some time ago by it and those who keep it up and running.

It appears from comments from the Minister for Housing, Planning and Local Government, Deputy Eoghan Murphy, in the media this morning that he either did not bother or simply forgot to include affordable housing in the budget. In the absence of any additional moneys allocated, we are still none the wiser as to how he would be in a position to extend these affordable schemes if he so wished. Criticism must be directed at the Minister for his failure to effect any real change in the Government's public housing strategy. His ineffectiveness must be a massive disappointment to the many front-line agencies which had hoped for and were led to believe there would be a change in direction.

Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil and the Independents have also sold us all a pig in a poke with the health allocation for 2018. The Minister for Finance made much yesterday of his multi hundred million euro figure. That is just budgetary trickery. As things stand, all of the promises of additional staff, reductions in the cost of medicine or investment in infrastructure are not worth the paper on which the Minister's budget speech was written. Factoring in the Government's own 2018 allocations for demographics, carryover amounts, pay agreements and the Health Service Executive's forecasted overspend, the 2018 allocation will at best enable the Department and services to stand still.

In real terms, it can be argued the Department of Health has seen a small decline in its funding envelope for next year. That is a shocking failure by the Government and, more particularly, on the Taoiseach's part as a health professional and former Minister for Health. The Government continues to manage the health service in a manner that seeks only to tinker around the edges. On the one hand, it denies the system of the resources and investment it rightly and desperately needs.

The Government also turns its face away from the fact that the two-tier nature of the health system fractures delivery and adds to the cost of the system. It refuses to confront those realities and panders to the vested interests which sustain that broken system.

The cut and paste job in respect of mental health in the budget and in Fianna Fáil's mockery of a pre-budget document is unforgivable. It demonstrates how out of touch the Government and Fianna Fáil are with service users and providers. The Government claims it is allocating an extra €35 million to developmental health services in 2018, which, even if true, would be inadequate. However, it is not true. Mental Health Reform did its sums very quickly yesterday because it is well accustomed to being let down by Government after Government in the context of mental health allocations. Its calculations gave the lie to the figures in the budget. It estimates that there might be an extra €11 million for developmental health services in 2018. It is worth reminding the House that 11 years have passed since the publication of the then Government's strategy on mental health, A Vision for Change. The strategy rightly enjoyed widespread support and is a fine document. However, the difficulty is that it was not implemented and we are now one year past the end of the envisaged ten-year programme but there is still no real prospect of proper investment in services that save vulnerable people's lives.

Child care is another critical infrastructure area ignored by the Government in the budget. I raised this issue with the Taoiseach last week or the week before. I commended to him the proposition in Sinn Féin's fully balanced and costed document that set out a fivefold increase in the child care budget. It could and would have meant a halving of child care costs for struggling families. However, the Government looked the other way and refused to regard affordable child care as a public service and crucial infrastructure. The budget delivered a little improvement in that area but not nearly enough. If the Taoiseach has listened to vox pops of public reaction to the budget, he cannot have missed the fact that parents have said that improvement was not enough. A minor addition to sessional, part-time child care does not solve the problem for working families. The sooner the Government wakes up to that, the better.

Child care is a low-pay sector. Those working in it are predominantly women. All Members familiar with those services know the precarious nature and low pay of employment in that sector need to be addressed if we are serious about early childhood development and education and proper services. However, nothing was done in the budget to address those issues.

Fianna Fáil's fake pre-budget document does not mention women, gender or equality even once in 24 glorious pages. I am disappointed that the Taoiseach did not take the initiative in the real budget, which was co-authored with Fianna Fáil, on gender discrimination against women in the context of the State pension. I thought all Members accepted the necessity of restoring the pre-2012 pension bands and rates that were vandalised by Deputy Burton and the Labour Party. I thought all Members were in agreement on that. We have been lobbied on these matters by women from urban and rural areas. However, as the Taoiseach knows, a very strong lobby for those changes has emerged among rural women. Those women had the impression that there was a consensus in the Dáil to right the wrong in terms of the State pension but the Government has failed to do so.

The Taoiseach said that the budget is in line with his wishes and aspirations. I have no doubt that it is. The difficulty is that he does not wish for nor aspire to an equal society. The irony is that for one who presents himself as a person of fiscal rectitude and who believes in competition and economic vigour, his budget is not only dangerous but deeply stupid. If he took a moment away from slagging those he regards as less entitled or who want everything for free, as he put it, and instead reflected on the evidence, he would understand that equal societies are prosperous societies. The evidence tells us that. Sinn Féin's pre-budget document set that out and we will campaign and fight for that. I hope that at some stage, rather than Sinn Féin borrowing election slogans, the Taoiseach might see the light, cop on and be won over to the logic of equality.

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