Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Even if it were €89 million, which it is not, nearly ten times that amount is required. In our alternative budget, we proposed €1 billion in additional investment in capital infrastructure to deal with the social crisis. It is not about tinkering around the edges and presenting this to what Fianna Fáil must believe is a gullible public as a real or genuine effort to deal with the housing crisis.

People in Ireland will not be fooled. We know there are measures for landlords, while others measures were not included in this budget that Fianna Fáil were advocating on behalf of landlords. It is clear these parties will not get in the way of the privileged and the real estate investors making a fortune from a social tragedy that both parties created. It has never been a worse time to be a renter and it has never been a better time to be a landlord. After this budget, nothing will have changed.

Nothing will have changed for Orla. Orla is 28 and she is a nurse. Like too many nurses, she sees emigration as her only choice. She contacted me so that as I speak to the Minister today, I could give voice to an Irish citizen abandoned by the Government. Orla wants to do all she can to help those in need in our hospitals and right now she is doing just that. She is giving everything to help others in need but like so many people forced to the edge each month, she is worried sick about bills. She dreams of one day having a family but she feels that she simply cannot afford to do so. She is a nurse and the lifeblood of our health service who says she avoids going to a doctor when she is sick because she simply cannot afford it. What a travesty and a failure of this Government and everything it stands for. Orla wants to be successful and give the best care she can to Irish citizens but she is forking out more than €500 a month for a single room in Dublin.

Orla’s story is the story of an endless cycle of Ireland’s most devoted and talented citizens. They have care in their hearts, they love their country but they have been let down by the Government. Orla has been forced to endure a housing crisis that is forcing her to consider giving up her job, her dreams and her home. Nothing will change after budget 2019 for Orla. That is the reality. The Minister and his Government believe it is not the State's job to provide housing and they want to leave it to the market. The market has clearly failed. The Government is happy to leave renters to the mercy of landlords but all too often landlords are using loopholes to evict tenants and jack up rents.

Today, the Government and Fianna Fáil have presented more solutions for landlords than for struggling tenants and those in dire need of a home, which says it all. These landlords are collecting rents that are more expensive than at any point in the State's history. The vast majority of landlords who will benefit from the increased landlord mortgage interest relief announced today are raking in fat profits. By itself, this measure is entirely useless. This budget is full of handouts and incentives for landlords but this is not a landlords' crisis; it is a renters' crisis. For another budget, the Minister has refused to give citizens any relief from this crisis. Freezing rents is what is required. We have said it time and again. Giving real certainty is what is required but the Minister has failed to bring this unforgivable mess to an end because he believes, as does Fianna Fáil, that the market will clean it up for him. He is blinded to the solutions because he does not believe in them. Sinn Féin has proposed the construction of 15,000 social and affordable homes in its alternative budget for 2019, an emergency rent freeze and proposed tax relief for renters equal to a full month's rent. We have put forward a radical and ambitious housing package targeting the core pillars of the crisis in affordability and supply. This budget is starved of the ambition and focus needed to end this crisis. How out of touch must Deputy Micheál Martin and Fianna Fáil be to keep a straight face and call this a housing budget? How many times must the names and memories of citizens deprived of a basic human right, the right to a home in their own country, ring out in this Chamber and the streets outside this building before the Government finally grasps that it needs to invest in, and build, social and affordable housing?

As I said at the beginning of my contribution, for what will soon be three budgets that the Deputy and Fianna Fáil have declared "housing budgets", Amanda will be homeless. She says her life is being robbed from her. It has being robbed because of the policies of this Government. It is robbing the life chances of 10,000 homeless citizens. This is not a mild political problem that the Minister can ignore. This is now a social tragedy of historic proportions for which he and his Government will forever be blamed. Nothing he can do now will heal its reputation as an Administration and rightly so. All he can do now is do the right thing and invest but for another budget, he has failed to do so. Renters need a rent freeze, rent relief and a doubling of social and affordable housing in 2019.

This Government is running out of excuses and Amanda, Orla and the people of Ireland are running out of time. So on the day when the Minister has condemned this State to yet another year of widespread and systemic housing policy failure, let us not mince words. This Government is responsible for creating and repeatedly deepening one of the worst social crises in the history of the State and has done so with the support of its colleagues in Fianna Fáil because the housing crisis is the direct result of the policy failures of the two parties passing the budget before this House. They alone are responsible for the failure to invest adequately in social and affordable homes. They could have taken that decision at any time over the past seven years but they refused to do so, instead cutting taxes and ensuring the wealthiest and the elite in society were protected at all times.

What is most frustrating for people, and for me as a public representative and finance spokesperson, is that all of this is avoidable. There is no reason the "supplying incompetence" agreement between Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil has brought forward three budgets that have completely under budgeted for our health service. Health is one of our most important public services. For some time now, in budget after budget, we have witnessed the systematic underfunding of the health service. The inevitable outcome is that the health service cannot deliver the services people need without going over budget because it was underfunded in the first instance, which has resulted in what the Minister likes to call an "overspend". This budget offered the opportunity to set out a sustainable and credible funding path for health to address capacity issues and funding shortages and to deliver a sustainable delivery plan for Sláintecare but no capacity solutions have been offered. We have not heard any. Instead, we got financial chicanery and budgetary deceit. The Minister has not offered a sustainable way forward for the health service and his measures have put it at huge risk in the coming years. He has used unexpected and unreliable corporation tax receipts for a quick, short term fix for the health budget, which is wrong. He has done this on the back of a corporation tax bonanza announced during the weekend. What has he done? He has blind sided the Opposition and the public and responded to the Government's chronic under funding of health by throwing volatile multinational tax receipts at our hospitals and our primary care centres instead of putting them on to a sustainable footing. The short-termism of funding a health service off a once-off corporation tax windfall is not just deceptive but extremely dangerous. We have been here before. The script has been written on the Opposition benches. Short-term populism through volatile revenue has Fianna Fáil's fingerprints are all over it. The Minister scrambles to plug the gap this year with corporate tax receipts that are volatile and heavily concentrated but they simply cannot be depended on.

I remind the Minister of the consequences of the Government's neglect. One in five people are stuck on waiting lists for basic emergency care. These people need it but they cannot get it in a broken and under-funded system overseen by Fine Gael for seven years now. The life chances of children with acute illnesses are being thrown away because they cannot access the services they need. There are pensioners whose lives have been put on hold until they can see a surgeon. If this is all the health system can offer citizens in a society as wealthy as ours, then it is a sign of an unprecedented failure. Around the world, citizens can have their needs met on time and as a right, not as consumers. This is what the Irish people deserve; nothing else will do. Tinkering around the edges will not deliver the health service that is their right. The Minister has proposed to reduce prescription charges for those over 70 by 50 cent and the drugs payment scheme threshold by €10. Prescription charges are a tax on ill health and any measure to lower them is welcomed but the Minister's moves on prescription charges and the drugs payment scheme are not ambitious enough and should have gone a lot further. It is unfortunate that it seems they will only be reduced for those over 70 as these costs are a huge burden to working families as well. Sinn Féin had budgeted for a €1 reduction in prescription charges across the board as the fairest way to reduce this unfair tax on ill health. We also budgeted to lower the drugs payment scheme to €100 and it is disappointing that the Government is only suggesting it will reduce this to €124. Medicines are completely unaffordable for countless families in this State and the Minister has done the least he possibly could to change this reality.

Today, he has once again failed to end the staffing crisis that is impacting on public health. We know that nurses and midwives are balloting to reject the Minister's pay agreement and we have the distinct possibility of a strike among these professions, yet he chose not to address the issues that are causing a recruitment and retention crisis throughout the health service. He has made it clear to them that they will be waiting until the Government is swept aside. Our health service needs real and sustainable investment into the future. The Minister has not done this today. Instead, he has used volatile corporation tax receipts to fund current expenditure in health, used the health service as an election tool and put it in danger of collapse in the coming years because his investments are not sustainable.

He announced new funding for the NTPF. This has Fianna Fáil's fingers all over it, which it proudly admits. The party is siphoning public moneys to line the pockets of private healthcare. Are private healthcare operators now vying for top spot on the Fianna Fáil gravy train along with property developers because it looks that way? The NTPF is short-term populism. As Dr. Sara Burke of the Centre for Health Policy and Management in Trinity College has pointed out, "Over a decade of pouring hundreds of millions into the NTPF is proof it does not address the underlying causes of the long waits for public patients in the first place", yet Fianna Fáil and the Government simply do not get it. Diverting public money into private healthcare is not only wrong; it does not make any financial sense in the long run. While we welcome the extension of GP care to what we understand is up to 100,000 people, this is the first acknowledgement that the Government cares at all about giving people the healthcare they deserve. However, it has not announced how capacity will be increased to deliver this. Based on speaking to GPs this morning, it seems there has been no consultation on delivering this. Currently, there is no capacity to deliver the levels of care we currently have and the Government has done nothing to change this. There should have been dialogue and investment first in increasing the number of doctors on the GP training scheme in order that the number of GPs and the capacity to deliver services can be increased.

This would have enabled patients to be seen for free in a timely manner and not be forced to wait weeks for an appointment or be forced to attend an emergency department for treatment. General practitioners are the cornerstone of our primary care services and we must ensure that we have a supply of GPs for the whole of the State. However, the Government completely ignores their concerns and opinions and has done nothing to tackle the capacity crisis in primary care. Expanding primary care must be the start of a long-term plan of investment in health, towards a truly universal system based on need and we must have the capacity to deliver that. If the Government was serious about free GP care, it would have delivered on this but it is not serious and it did not do so.

The only end point for our health service is a universal system of world-class care, free at the point of need for every Irish citizen as a birthright. If we want a system truly worthy of the compassion and duty of care Irish citizens show one another, then the Government has to fund it and fund it in a sustainable and long-term manner. The Minister was faced with the choice today to sustainably address the systematic problems that were the result of underfunding the health service over many years and he chose to engage in the same type of voodoo economics that drove us to financial ruin more than a decade ago. The Minister's actions today regarding the health service put the future sustainability of this most essential public service at even greater risk.

Childcare costs are increasing faster than subsidies are matching them. Despite the measures introduced today, which are welcome, many families will continue to pay the equivalent of a second mortgage. With the exception of what citizens must pay for a fundamentally broken system of housing provision, childcare is now a primary burden on family incomes. In fact for many people, overwhelmingly Irish women, the only means by which it can be avoided is to sacrifice their career ambitions. This says to these women that their lives are not equal. How many careers were set aside because care for children was simply out of reach? Tackling the cost of childcare is one thing, but introducing meaningful reform to the sector is also important.

Sinn Féin proposed slashing the cost of childcare in half but most importantly, we would also make an allocation to make the minimum entry level wage for childcare workers a real, living wage. This would be a core component of a new and comprehensive sector-wide agreement that would improve working conditions and quality of service across providers in the State. Furthermore, we also would increase capitation grants to childcare providers next year to enhance core funding and drive quality improvements. These are the decisions needed to give Irish people the public services they deserve and have earned, having endured the Government's austerity programmes for years.

There are many challenges as we face into the uncertainty of Brexit. If recent weeks are anything to go by, the DUP-Tory alliance is hell-bent on inflicting as much economic damage to this island as is within its power. Citizens' rights must be protected and businesses need certainty. This will be one of the biggest political and economic challenges of a generation and the Irish people need a proactive Government, willing to step in and invest in their needs. This is with or without a hardening of Britain’s Border in Ireland. Whatever the outcome of Brexit, the outcome for Ireland will not be good. As a priority, we need to do all that we can to prepare the economy for many rocky Brexit years ahead. This means investing more into education across all levels. This means capital investment and it means investing in the full potential of small and medium-sized businesses on this island. These are urgent objectives for the Government and this budget shows another missed opportunity to achieve them. What is needed to help upgrade the capacity of small and medium-sized businesses is a further investment in their digital profile. One fifth of businesses have no digital presence whatever and one third cannot process orders online, but nothing in this budget will give struggling small and medium-sized enterprises, SMEs, such backing. This budget needed to drive productivity among small businesses at a time of uncertainty. Making research and development tax credits more accessible to small enterprises would be of vital importance to their fortunes in the future, as would increasing from 25% to 30% the rate at which they can benefit. These are measures which Sinn Féin proposed but against which the Minister turned his face. If this is a Brexit budget, and it must be, then it has failed to give the investment needed to get our economic house in order. Sinn Féin would have increased funding to Enterprise Ireland to a record €300 million, with an increased allocation of €27 million, and would have increased support for IDA Ireland to continue to drive foreign direct investment in difficult times ahead, particularly in the regions. That needs to be done, however, with the support of others.

While this budget delivers a €1.5 billion increase in capital spending this year, that is barely enough to undo the damage done by years of neglect by this Government, when we had the lowest investment in capital among our EU competitors. Having allowed this bottleneck to develop, there also are doubts about the Government's ability to deliver on this spending. To give real certainty to any capital plans, this budget needed to invest in a new generation of Irish workers. It needed thousands of more people learning trades and getting involved in apprenticeships; more than the Government has forecast. It needed investment to support these positions and to encourage more women to learn these essential skills. It failed to deliver on any of this and has not been ambitious enough in this regard.

As part of Brexit, there is an opportunity to develop a long-term and more sustainable vision for Irish industry and enterprise. Unsurprisingly, it is an opportunity not seized in this budget. The productivity gap between booming multinationals and our indigenous sector is growing. In many ways, this is creating two economies on our island with a high-profit, high-wage and extremely low-tax environment for billionaire tech firms and a much lower-wage, less productive cohort of small and medium businesses whose biggest markets and opportunities for growth are now receding from the world. In recent years the exports of small enterprises on this island have become increasingly concentrated in Britain and the United States, the President of the latter referring to these exports as his "foe".

World-class public services must be supported by a dynamic and cutting-edge private sector but it must be socially responsible, rooted in community and one in which workers have a real stake. Sinn Féin wants to rebalance our economy and we believe Ireland and its workers deserve a new and ambitious industrial policy. This must rebalance meaningful and productive economic activity to ensure it takes place in every community on our island. As the damaging impact of Brexit becoming increasingly clear, there is increased urgency for the development of a more stable vision for our economy with more stable and transparent economic growth, more stable and dependable corporate tax receipts, a greater diversity of more reliable export markets and the attraction of high-level value-added operations to our Border, rural and western hinterlands. Now is the time to invest and to give Irish business and Irish citizens a bold vision for the future.

When support is needed, it will be needed most of all for the most vulnerable in society. The Minister for Finance and the Taoiseach have said many times that this budget will reverse all cuts to social protection payments made in the past. This is simply untrue. What about the blatant discrimination against young people in search of work? Is their need of a basic income any less than someone a year or two older than them? People aged between 18 and 24 years are expected to live on €112.70 a week, while almost 8,000 of them are long-term unemployed. This is pushing them further into poverty. The Government has continued Fianna Fáil's discrimination against young people and has widened the gap between young jobseekers and those over 26 years by €92.70.

What about social welfare recipients suffering from coeliac disease who used to get a little supplement to help towards the high cost of their medically necessary diet or those suffering from throat cancer and stroke forced on to a liquid-only diet? The Government abolished that supplement back in 2014, yet the Minister did not reverse the cut. While the Minister has increased social welfare payments, he is forcing those living from week to week to wait until March to access it. The Government has not completely reversed the so-called era of austerity cuts; it is prolonging some of the most vicious cuts made to social welfare. While the Government finally invested some of what is needed in people, the Minster should not pretend that it is nearly enough to cope with the costs of living being forced on them. The Minister should not pretend that he has not prolonged the suffering of people with disabilities, lone parents and their children by making them wait until March when he is ready to pay them. Nevertheless, the Minister carries on with the spin that his is the party for those in need. Fianna Fáil brought forward a motion in April that was passed by this House to provide an occupational pension for 1,250 community employment, CE, supervisors and assistant supervisors in line with a 2008 Labour Court recommendation. Clearly Fianna Fáil did not bother to negotiate for this in this budget. Instead those CE supervisors who gave so much to their local communities will be left with nothing to show for it at retirement. That is a disgrace and shows the two-faced politics of that party.

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