Róisín Shortall (Dublin North West, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

The budget took a scattergun approach to the country's finances. It lacked any kind of vision or strategy and was a missed opportunity to set the country on a fair and sustainable course. The emphasis on cutting taxes is deeply regressive and unfair and very much widens the gap between the haves and the have-nots. It was not by chance that Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil spent the past few weeks scrapping about tax cuts, as it served as a major distraction from the big problems facing the country, most notably the crises in health and housing which those two parties are largely responsible for creating.

In terms of tax changes and income tax in particular, it is important to remind ourselves that the majority of income earners earn less than €35,000 per year, as is borne out by the ready reckoner provided by the Revenue Commissioners prior to the budget. Some 58% of income earners have annual incomes of less than €35,000. We frequently hear the Taoiseach and other Ministers talk about people on €60,000 to €70,000 per year as being middle-income earners but that is entirely inaccurate. There is little or no tax benefit in the budget for the 1.5 million income earners who make less than €35,000 a year. It is interesting to note that of the ten sample households shown in the Department's tax policy change document, only two earn less than €35,000. That is hardly representative of the population. Only one of the fictional households depicted in today's edition of The Irish Timesearns less than €35,000 and that person is said to be a student who is working part time. Last night, the "Prime Time" television programme featured the wife of a soldier whose family will gain €1.35 per week from the budget changes. That is an insult to any family that is truly in the middle-income bracket. That is the reality of what the budget means to people. The sum total of the benefit from the tax package announced yesterday to a person with a partner serving in the Defence Forces and her family is €1.35. That is shameful. For the Taoiseach to claim that everyone benefits is untrue.

The Government could have targeted the high cost of living for families instead of bringing in tax cuts that benefit the better off. It could have tackled the high cost of insurance, reduced the price of transport fares, controlled the cost of housing and health or introduced free primary education. Not only would that approach have benefitted all households, it would have been a lot fairer and more sustainable. The Social Democrats party has said in recent years that we should not erode the tax base. How will future services be funded if the Government continues to cut taxes? It would have been far more sustainable and made much more sense if the Government had retained the integrity of the tax base and concentrated on improving public services and cutting the cost of living as everybody would have benefitted from that.

The cost of health care is one of the biggest burdens on families. A huge range of additional costs have been imposed on both those with medical cards and those paying very high medical insurance. The Sláintecare reform programme sets out a plan to cut waiting lists, remove charges and introduce a universal public health service. It is extremely disappointing that the Government has failed to provide the funding necessary to fully implement phase 1 of Sláintecare next year. This was a unique opportunity for the Government to do something of real consequence in respect of our failing health service because cross-party political consensus on the way forward and the kind of health service we need in this country had already been achieved. Unfortunately, the Government has failed to provide adequate funding to implement that. The precise details of the health budget have not yet been revealed but it is clear that the allocation falls far short of what is required.

I am also concerned by the capital allocation in health. Sláintecare recommended an investment of €500 million in capital expenditure to catch up with the underspend of the austerity years and to provide the primary care centres and ICT that is so necessary in this area. It is impossible to get reliable data, as the Minister of State knows, and without such data, there cannot be a fair and effective allocation of resources, nor can there be adequate performance management - whether in respect of administrators or clinical staff - and nor can adequate consideration be given to how services are provided. Without the key data that are required, we do not have the means to measure services or establish whether we are getting value for money. Investing in the ehealth programme now would bring significant future savings. The general approach taken in Sláintecare was to invest now in order to save in the future because the high cost of providing our health services in the way that is currently being done is not sustainable. We have to change the model of care.

Instead, the Government is relying on the stop-gap measure of the National Treatment Purchase Fund. There is little to indicate a real commitment to proper reform of the health service.

We need to move beyond this kind of knee-jerk response to waiting lists and put in place the kind of system change Sláintecare sets out. The individual Ministers' initiatives and short term and stopgap solutions we have had over the past ten to 20 years do not make any appreciable difference in the long term and are extremely costly. One would have to ask why we should be paying some consultants on the double for work they are doing in order to tackle the hospital waiting lists.

Whether one is renting, buying or on a social housing waiting list, housing represents the biggest cost for families, yet this budget fails to introduce an affordable housing scheme to control rents or to fund an adequate number of social houses. The measures outlined yesterday are not sufficient to make an appreciable difference to the housing crisis. For the most part, the Government used the budget as an opportunity to re-announce housebuilding figures that we have known for some time. Once again, the main people who will benefit from the Government's housing policy are developers and landlords. This is yet another budget with far too much carrot and not enough stick. Take, for example, the vacant site levy, probably the headline policy from the Minister's announcement yesterday. He has introduced an increase to 7% at a time when the price of land is rising at around twice that rate. Why should we assume that speculators will not simply weigh up the cost of this tax against the greater benefit they can reap from rising property and land prices and just continue to sit on it? Land hoarding has been a central factor in the lack of supply and the unaffordability of housing. Both this and the previous Government have completely failed to tackle this issue. The tokenistic vacant site levy has lacked teeth. If the Government were serious about driving down the cost of housing, it would have announced an effective land hoarding tax for 2018.

Some of the improvements regarding child care are to be welcomed, particularly additional supports for the formal child care sector and the commitment to improved early years inspections. However, there does not seem to be any attempt to address the root causes of the sustainability crisis in the sector. We all talk about raising standards, but the sector's economic model ties the hands of providers, restricts quality and limits child care workers' terms and conditions and career progression. It is absurd that well-trained early years educators are still forced to sign on during the summer months. I know the Minister, Deputy Zappone, has commissioned an assessment of the economic cost of quality child care, but this is not due until late next year, and I believe she should give a commitment to fast-track this report now.

It is also particularly disappointing that there is no mention in the budget of paid parental leave, as promised in the programme for Government. Ireland has the poorest provision of paid parental leave in the EU. We should ensure that all children can be cared for in the home during the first year of their lives. Equally, no financial assistance is available for the majority of working parents of young children. Over 70% of working parents do not use the formal child care system, and we should have introduced an early years payment to assist those families.

Nor has anything been done to address the impact of successive regressive budgets on one of the groups at greatest risk of poverty and most affected by the cost of child care. I refer to lone parents. Only on Monday of this week, the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection published the Indecon study on the impact of the changes to the one-parent family payment. It found significant increases in deprivation among lone parent families after losing the one-parent family payment, yet very little has been done to address the huge, often disproportionate costs lone parents face. A commitment was given that this Indecon report would influence decisions taken in this budget, and it is a real insult to those struggling lone parents that the report was only published on Monday of this week and clearly did not feed into the budget proposals. This is a major failing on the part of the Minister for Employment Affairs and Social Protection. It is nonsense to claim that the changes that were introduced in themselves reduced dependency on welfare in a situation whereby welfare payments were cut off. There are many benefits to parents accessing education, training and work, but their children should not pay the price for this. We were promised a Scandinavian style of child care for these families. The Government should either fund this kind of child care or reverse the cuts to the one-parent family payment.

I wish to talk about what can be referred to as the locked-out generation. In trying to claim that the Government has done something for everyone, it has ignored those who probably need its help most, namely, the younger generation, those people who are often referred to as the locked-out generation, people in their 20s and 30s. This morning, the Taoiseach said the Government's policies would allow the next generation to be free from the burden of excessive debt so they can build their lives here. How does the Government expect young people to do this when they continue to be locked out of the things that most Members of this House have taken for granted? I refer to such things as reasonable dreams and aspirations to get a permanent job that will provide a pension in the future to enable a person to live life to the full and aspirations to buy one's own place to live, to settle down and to have a family. The reality now is that for a great number of our young people in their 20s and 30s, those aspirations are no longer realistic. It is this younger generation, the locked-out generation, that has borne the brunt of the mistakes of its elders in being saddled with a huge debt, and this will continue for the foreseeable future. This generation is very much locked out, and it seems to a large extent that the people who went before them have pulled the ladder up after them. I refer to things like the lack of affordability of housing, whether one is renting or trying to get on the property ladder, precarious work and the two-tier pay scales that apply for nurses, teachers, doctors, gardaí and a whole range of other people working in the public service. It has been an enormous kick in the teeth for those of this younger generation who are now being deprived of what their parents and grandparents were able to aspire to. These people are paying a huge price and, it seems, will continue to do so for the mistakes of their elders, and there is nothing in yesterday's budget to improve the situation for them.

The budget was also a big disappointment to many women approaching pension age who continue to be denied access to a full State pension because of cuts in qualifications that were introduced in 2012. It is completely unacceptable that these women continue to be punished for leaving the workforce for a period in order to engage in care work in the home. Many of them were forced out due to the marriage bar. This must be addressed in the social welfare Bill, and I will certainly be bringing forward proposals on that.

Overall, the hallmark of this budget is short termism and inequality. To both Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, I say that those who fail to learn from the mistakes of history are doomed to repeat it. Unfortunately, it looks like we are facing back into another troubled period.

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