Joan Collins (Dublin South Central, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am sharing time with Deputies Maureen O'Sullivan and Catherine Connolly.

This budget and the overall approach of the Government can be summed up in three words, "crisis, what crisis?". According to the speech by the Minister for Finance, everything is going according to plan and no major changes or emergency actions are required. It is a case of give a bit here, take a bit there, stick a plaster on the health service, prioritise the Fine Gael vote and carry on business as usual. This flies in the face of reality for many people, given the 139,000 children in consistent poverty, the 680,000 people on hospital waiting lists and the escalating emergency in housing and homelessness. These are not just figures; the 139,000 and 680,000 are humans.

Two families per day are losing their homes. That means another 1,000 children, at least, waiting to get into bed and breakfast accommodation, hotels or hubs over the next year. We are being informed by people that they cannot access emergency services. I recently dealt with a young woman with three children, one of whom is on the autistic spectrum, who recently found themselves homeless. She linked in with Focus Ireland and had to self-accommodate daily. On two nights the woman was told the services had nothing for her family. She was told to go to the Garda station. Instead, she rang around friends to try to get accommodation quickly. She managed to get that from friends. She was depending on the charity of friends to get her children a roof over their heads.

There are three key issues. Of course, there are others but these are the key areas demanding urgent emergency action. With regard to poverty, a key factor is the widespread existence of low pay. Some 24% of workers are low paid and 100,000 people with jobs experience poverty in one form or another. The Indecon report on lone parents was supposed to be delivered long before the budget but was only released last Monday. It showed an increase in the number of lone parents working but found that 52% were worse off due to the cuts introduced by Deputy Burton in 2012. She shed crocodile tears here yesterday about her shock at how children were being treated in the budget. Simply having a job without the necessary support of child care, housing and good public services does not, in itself, lift many people out of poverty.

The 30 cent per hour increase in the minimum wage is paltry. The minimum wage is still €2.15 below the living wage recommendation of €11.70 per hour. Let us be realistic about what the living wage recommendation represents. A person working full-time for this hourly rate would have a wage of €23,000 per year. This worker gains nothing from the lowering of the 40% tax band. He or she will gain very little from the USC reductions. In fact, it is a grand total of €1.21 per week. Contrast that to somebody who is on €72,000 per year who gains €6.30 per week. That is not a fortune either, by any means, but it demonstrates once again that tax cuts favour the better off. Tax cuts which have favoured the better off since 2015 - the wealthiest 20% of people in this country and business - now total more than €3 billion.

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What could we have done with this €3 billion in terms of providing services for homeless people, improving health care and addressing poverty?

Ireland is a low tax economy, except in the area of value added tax which impacts most on those on low incomes. If we want to tackle the housing and homelessness crisis, the problems in the health service and the scourge of high levels of poverty, we cannot afford to continually cut taxes on higher incomes, allow 13 of the 100 richest corporations to play below 1% in corporation profit tax and have the lowest level of employers' PRSI in Europe. We must tax wealth.

Billions of euro in potential income could be found. Between €5 billion and €10 billion is being passed up every year because of an ideological obsession with low taxes. Changing this approach would not mean increasing taxes on low to middle incomes. Leaving income tax rates as they are for higher earners on annual incomes of more than €70,000 would hardly cripple this group. Increasing PRSI for employers towards the European Union average would raise up to €4 billion per annum, which could be used to address the issues to which I referred.

Implementing the call from Social Justice Ireland to introduce a 6% minimum rate of corporation tax is hardly a mad revolutionary proposal. Based on this rate, a company making a profit of €100 million would give €6 million to the State and keep €94 million. While this would hardly amount to a raid on profits, it would raise billions of euro. A wealth tax set at a low rate of 1% would raise a minimum of €500 million per annum. These are the alternatives, the measures that would provide the funding needed to solve the crisis in housing and health without breaking the fiscal rules.

Ireland has refused to take from Apple €13 billion in taxes which the European Commission determined we were owed. The Government is spending €3.6 million challenging the Commission's decision and defending Apple. In recent days, Mr. Paul Sommerville estimated that Ireland had lost €500 million through its failure to collect the €13 billion from Apple on time because of fluctuations in exchange rates. This €500 million and the €13 billion the Government refuses to collect could be a game changer for the country.

The extra money allocated to health in the budget is a sticking plaster when major surgery is required. Of the €548 million announced, €97 million is a carryover from 2017 and €165 million will be used for an agreed pay deal. The remainder may not be enough to fund the existing level of services and complete projects such as the new national children's hospital. At least another €1 billion would be necessary to solve the most urgent problems in a system in crisis. The Sláintecare report called for another €600 million per annum for five years to implement the proposals in the report. This is a conservative estimate of the additional funds required.

The lack of urgency in addressing the housing and homelessness crisis is simply mind-boggling. The budget provides €750 million in credit for developers to be administered by the developers' friend, the National Asset Management Agency, NAMA. This is an insult to the 8,000 homeless people, 100,000 people on housing waiting lists, 60,000 people in serious mortgage arrears and at least 100,000 people struggling with sky high rents. We could build 5,000 public social housing units on State owned land with €1 billion.

The Nevin Economic Research Institute has proposed a programme to build and acquire 70,000 affordable rented units over five years at a cost of €12 billion. The programme would require start-up capital of €3 billion. The €3 billion return the State received for AIB shares could have been invested in this programme and we could have begun to develop the National Pensions Reserve Fund. The initial €3 billion could have been leveraged to €9 billion off the books by the Housing Finance Agency. Credit unions offered €1 billion for this type of housing investment.

While these proposals are not rocket science, to be successful we would require a break from developer and private sector led solutions to the crisis and the obsession with a low tax economy. Without such a break, we will have a permanent crisis in health, housing and homelessness and large numbers of families will be condemned to live in poverty. This is hardly a republic of opportunity.

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