Ruth Coppinger (Dublin West, Solidarity) | Oireachtas source

There is a very well-worn formula whereby the Minister for Finance makes a long budget speech with lots of pomp and ceremony and fanfare and the next day the Opposition goes meticulously through the budget measures etc. Hours of Dáil debate have been dedicated to the budget to give the impression that something significant has happened. What really has happened? Hundreds of thousands of people who are merely existing, not living, had any faint hope dashed that this Government would do anything about their plight. On Monday a journalist in The Irish Timesstated the Government is "gaslighting" the nation about affordable housing. It is gaslighting the nation about the budget as well because using the pretext of Brexit, the Government and Fianna Fáil constantly repeat the refrain that we must go softly, softly, we cannot do anything, we must maintain the status quo. The mainstay of the budget was to set up a €1 billion fund for business to withstand Brexit shocks but with no strings attached obliging them to maintain jobs if they get a bailout from the fund.

It would be nice if the media reported that, rather than giving the impression that we are all in this together. We know well from the last recession that we are not all in this together. To prove that there is one law for the rich and another for the poor, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, which will sign off on the budget, postponed any measly increase in the minimum wage, using the bogeyman of Brexit. The tens of thousands of lowest-paid workers in this country include workers in this building. Yesterday, I met an usher who has just started to work here and told me that he earns a couple of cent above the minimum wage and he got nothing in this budget apart from a carbon tax. One would expect a carbon tax to be loaded onto the backs of those who create most of the carbon emissions, for example, on some of the 100 global companies who create 71% of emissions and have done so since 1988. Instead, however, it is levied across the board on workers, pensioners and the disabled, who have no alternative means of heating their homes or of transport.

The idea of taking the wealth that exists in our society and bringing it under the control of the State in order that the lives of the majority can be improved is always off limits in these budgets. Imagine if yesterday, for example, the Minister announced that he was going to build not-for-profit housing on the vacant sites all around the country and give councils the money to build on them. That is a revolutionary idea now, in the era of neoliberal capitalism. It was a normal idea 40 years ago when I was growing up. Yes, it would be a major annoyance to the BAMs of this world, to the investors, developers and landlords who are doing very nicely out of the housing scarcity but imagine how it would transform the lives of thousands in this country. Building workers would be paid decent wages to build the houses, rents and mortgages would be at cost price, there would be democratic input from communities into their surroundings. All of this would be completely possible, had the State yesterday decided to set up a building company and to use the record numbers of high net worth individuals, the billionaires and millionaires, and to tax them to pay for that. The fifth largest number of such individualsper capitain the world exists in Ireland. The same goes for childcare. Parents up and down the country are paying a second mortgage in childcare costs. Why not have a public childcare system as we have a primary and secondary school system, subsidised by the State, to allow women in particular to work to their highest ability? The fourth largest financial sector in the EU is based in Ireland. What if, instead of a carbon tax with a minimal impact, the Government decided to introduce a financial transactions tax of 0.1%, a measly amount, on highly-profitable companies and used it to pay for the immediate introduction of free public transport because the amount is equivalent? That would be a massive contribution to the environment and to the lives of workers who commute. Instead, that wealth will be left untouched and untapped because the main parties in here have a consensus. They will quibble over a fiver here or there but will not consider the idea of actually challenging the 1%, who in Ireland own 15% of the wealth. That goes for Fine Gael and the Independent Alliance, for Fianna Fáil, which had a hand in this budget and which will not, I assume, vote against it, for Labour and the Greens, who have been in government with them and look to do that again if the numbers stack up.

It goes for any parties in the House that accept the idea of a limited fiscal space and of leaving the super rich and corporations untouched, and that talk about "progressive" and "modern" but do not talk about capitalism. In America, there is probably only one presidential candidate likely to be able to undercut and defeat Trump in the next election, namely, Bernie Sanders. He is the only candidate who talks about the 1%, a political revolution against the billionaire class and a class war, with the working class being victorious. The reason only Bernie Sanders can defeat Trump is that he tackles the issue of wealth.

As a socialist, I stand for the democratic ownership and control of wealth to provide for the needs of society, including housing, which is the biggest crisis we face, in respect of rent and social housing. We need an effective corporation tax rate, given that even the EU norm could allow 20,000 social and affordable homes to be built immediately. Education, which was ignored yesterday, should be a right for every person, including children with special needs or autism spectrum disorder, ASD. High quality childcare should be free. Why should people in Dublin, the capital city, have to pay on average €1,000 a month? Measly concessions have been introduced by the Government but they are difficult to access. There should also be a national health service. All such measures could be provided if the wealth in society was taken and used for the benefit of the majority. Instead, yesterday was a continuation of the same, with the position of the lowest paid left utterly unimproved, and a failure to tackle the biggest crises in the State, namely, housing and health. It is unfortunate that the Minister and the Taoiseach invariably leave the Chamber before the left-wing Deputies speak. That is fine - we are used to it - but we consider it a signal of their unwillingness to listen or engage and it is noted by the people.

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