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

Indeed, possibly the longest in the history of the world. We have emergency legislation in an economy that is recording record growth rates, where the Government is boasting about the level of economic growth and where corporate profits have doubled since the Government came into power from €77 billion to €144 billion. Some people in the economy are doing well but still it appears we need emergency legislation to keep the pay of public sector workers down, which is outrageous. The problem is not just that it is unfair on those workers but unless the inequality and unfairness are addressed, we will not get people to return to the health sector, in particular, to education or to other key areas of the public service where we need them.

I will give a few more examples of the miserable give back in the budget for ordinary working people. A single public servant on €25,000 will get an extra 51 cent - whoopee. They will be dancing in the aisles for that one. It would not even get them a cup of coffee. A couple, with one on the average industrial wage of €39,000 and a partner on €31,000, with two children and struggling to pay the rent and childcare, will get a grand total of €3.50 per week, just about the price of a cup of coffee. That is what the Government is giving back to working people.

Then we have education, which is very serious. The budget has increased the capitation grant to schools by 5% but this still leaves it at €22 less than it was in 2008 when the State started to cut. Even with this 5% increase, which brings it up to €178.50 per pupil, it is still less than the €200 it was back in 2008. So much for a recovery for our schoolchildren and for the funding we desperately need. As a consequence, there has been no move on pupil-teacher ratios in our desperately overcrowded schools, which are among the most overcrowded in the western world. One of the biggest failures in the budget is in the area of third level education. This is quite shocking. We have just had reports that this year our universities are again tumbling in the world rankings. The Government has boasted it will have 15,000 more places in higher and further education, 3,500 additional places in undergraduate education, which sounds good, and 18,500 additional people going into higher level education. One would think this would require additional funding. Do Members know how much additional funding will go into higher education? It is 1%, at €13 million more than allocated last year. This is supposed to cover 18,500 additional students in third level education. This means the amount going into further and third level education per student will drop significantly, when there is a crisis in investment and funding already and we are tumbling down the world rankings in universities and higher education. This is a serious problem. One does not have to be a socialist or a radical to understand what this means for the future capacity of the country to develop a sustainable economy or to withstand the inevitable shocks we will face.

We had a report this week stating the climate crisis is even worse than the worst imaginings we had previously. Ireland is one of the worst performers in addressing climate change. It is not meeting its climate change targets and it will face hundreds of millions of euro in fines in the coming years because of its failure to meet its emission targets. What do we get in budget? Next to nothing. One thing I will concede, and it is something we have been campaigning for strongly over the past five years, is that extra money has been provided in the area of forestry. I acknowledge this, and I am glad it is happening, but if it is not linked to breaking from the current industrial model of forestry and the monocultural model of the Sitka spruce, it will not deal with the environmental problems. It will cause as many environmental problems as it will solve. We need to link any additional funding and forestry to the development of native and broadleaf species-----

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