Pat Buckley (Cork East, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Budget 2019 is not a budget for the ordinary people of the country or those from east Cork, but one for landlords and the wealthy. Issues plaguing the people, such as housing and health, were spoken about at length, but very little in the way of actual solutions was offered. In east Cork there have been huge rises in rent in recent years. The lowest one will pay for an apartment is €900 a month; the majority cost over €1,300 per month. Many people are paying close to and possibly more than half their income after tax on rent. Some people rent rooms in houses with five or six strangers, which costs a minimum of €400 a month. We have touched on the issue of rent pressure zones a number of times. East Cork is not in a rent pressure zone, and due to the ridiculous model the Government has applied it never will be. A national averaging system is used, and east Cork will never make the national average and so will never be part of the rent pressure zone, ensuring the dog will constantly chase its tail. Instead of freezing rents, giving tax relief to renters and investing in social and affordable housing, as Sinn Féin called for in its alternative budget, the Government backed the people making huge profits from the country’s housing misery. The solution as Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil see it is to give tax relief to landlords. Budget 2019 was heralded earlier this month as the housing budget, but it will deliver just 490 additional homes and will do nothing to tackle the highest rents in the history of the State, while 10,000 people remain homeless.

The Government also talks a good game on mental health but delivers less than it claims. Not only did the Minister, Deputy Donohoe, mislead the Dáil by claiming pay awards for staff as new funding but one prominent mental health campaigner told me there has been no funding allocated to cover unfunded services in mental health. Unfunded mental health services for people with very complex needs and requiring urgent private placements received no allocation whatsoever. Will these shortfalls be covered by delays in spending development funding? It also seems that a portion of the €55 million additional funding announced will go to a referral service and not to services which badly need it. This funding will be handled by the National Ambulance Service and not mental health services. The referrals will be to charity-based organisations rather than State-provided services, which are fully regulated. Will the Minister confirm this? What moneys are to be allocated to this service? How will he guarantee this is not simply more of the same policy of money going from mental health into general health at the expense of new service development?

I have sat on these benches for three budgets now. The only thing we received from the Minister in terms of the mental health budget was the figure of €84 million. I thank the office of the Minister of State, Deputy Jim Daly, which provided us with confirmation that €29 million of that allocation has already been spent. The magic figure is €55 million. It is very frustrating. Sinn Féin gets its costings for any section of the budget from the same place the Government gets its costings, but there is no clarity and no transparency. We have been left with a blank page tonight; we do not know what the actual level of spending is.

Tourism received a massive blow. No funding was provided for Ireland's Ancient East; it was not even mentioned in the Minister's speech. The increase of VAT on not just hotels but on the entire hospitality industry is detrimental to rural Ireland. This is another budget of spin, which serves the wealthy and powerful and leaves the ordinary people of the country to struggle on. We can do much better. As Fianna Fáil decides whether to prop up the Government for another year, it would do very well to consider who it is serving.

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