Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

The Minister has praised the budget for what he would see as its prudence and pragmatism as against what he might imagine would be our more extreme or radical approaches to the budget. Fianna Fáil has largely supported the Minister, although it wants its cake and to be able to eat it, by taking credit for what its sees as the good measures in the budget but distancing itself from its failures. I put it to the Minister that this is a budget that simply does not address the big problems our society faces and that the people who needed help in the budget would have hoped for. We can talk all we like about prudence and balancing the books but what people hoped for after seven or eight years of crushing austerity - which robbed them of their incomes and, in some cases, their homes and their jobs, which saw the destruction of public services and cuts that have landed us in a diabolical housing crisis and that have landed the public health system in just about as bad as shambles as it could possibly be in - was that the budget might have substantially addressed some of those issues. They might have hoped for that in particular because the Government never stops crowing about what a success the Irish economy has become, about the recovery and about the fact that we are fastest-growing economy in Europe. Against that background, people might have expected more, but the fact of the matter is that the budget is not going to solve the problems. When we boil it all down and we hear all the talk about balancing books, the reality is that 3,800 new council houses will be built next year against a background of 100,000 families who have now been waiting up to 17 or 18 years on a housing list and against a homelessness crisis that continues every week to spiral further and further out of control. The promises on social housing arising out of the budget allocations are that there is no increase in the output of social housing next year over and above what had been promised previously; in the case of the health service, the nurses and doctors have told us - it is not the radical left saying this - that the additional allocation for the health service will just about, if at all, keep pace with the additional demands that will come on the health service next year; and for everybody else the increase is a fiver a week. That is against a background of the bills people have had to pay increasing dramatically. Rents have gone up 60% in recent years. Motor insurance premiums have gone up 60%. Bin charges are set to go up by another €30 a year next year. There are increases in the public service obligation levy, increases in electricity and gas prices and so on.

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