Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE) | Oireachtas source

The way the Government and the political establishment have been marketing the July stimulus, one would think that it was going to transform the economy, that it will be a landmark for the Government and will show that it is up to the tasks ahead of it. The reality, however, is that the stimulus package is socially unjust and regressive and is economically irrational from the point of view of the majority of people in this society. Moreover, the propaganda campaign that the Government has used to sell the stimulus is fundamentally dishonest. The Government feds us austerity and calls it stimulus.

The Government claims that this is the greatest ever State investment in the economy, at €7.4 billion. While Fianna Fáil and the Green Party may have forgotten their last period in government, the rest of us have not and people remember that they spent €64 billion on a stimulus based on bailing out the banks. What we see in this package is a litany of handouts for business, the stay and spend incentive, which will do nothing to stimulate demand among the hundreds of thousands of unemployed people who cannot access it, the wage support scheme that looks like it has been designed to be abused by businesses seeking to exploit cheap labour and a raft of tax breaks. What do workers get? Massive cuts to the pandemic unemployment payment with more cuts to come in the future. It cannot be called a stimulus when all the investment will benefit a small minority and it contains measures that will make hundreds of thousands of people worse off and take hundreds of millions of euro out of the economy while doing so.

Let us take the example of the help-to-buy scheme. It has expanded further and that is simply more money going into the pockets of developers. Even at this time of economic crisis and the deep depression that is opening up, the Government's stimulus includes more money for private developers. It is a measure that stimulates demand in the housing market, in a context when demand already massively outweighs the available supply. The Government's answer is to stimulate that demand further, which is a recipe for the continued driving up of house prices and putting homes further out of the reach of more and more working-class people. The only way to solve the housing crisis is by doing what the Government does not want to do, and that is mass building of public housing. If there is a supply shortage, increase the supply and do not push up the price.

I draw attention to something contained in the July stimulus that has attracted little attention so far, namely, its labour activation measures. Let us look at a press release from the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection, over which the Minister, Deputy Humphreys, presides, which has announced an additional 10,000 places are to be provided on the youth employment support scheme, YESS. That is a lot of people, especially when we remember that the total number of people who went through the JobBridge scheme, which was a major controversy at the time, was 38,000 people over five years.

This YES scheme is to be expanded from a small scheme for 18 to 24 year olds to people of all ages. It is a return to the widely-hated JobBridge scheme, or ScamBridge as we termed it at time, except that it has been made even worse. There are three-to-six-month internships, at 24 hours a week and with weekly pay of €229. That is €26 extra for 24 hours of work a week. That is less than the €50 top-up, which was rightly seen as an insult when it came to the JobBridge scheme. It amounts to less than €1.08 an hour and it is designed to drive down wages. It is no accident that it comes in the same week as the decision to not increase the minimum wage and to slash further the PUP. It is all designed to depress wages across the economy.

That is what we get, instead of the State directly investing in creating the jobs we need in health and education. People will not accept JobBridge 2.0. They will see it as the scam that it is. Internships currently available on the scheme include working as a warehouse operative, an administrative assistant in a credit union and a pharmacy sales assistant. Like JobBridge, those sound much more like jobs rather than genuine internships. The justification that this scheme is for young people with no work experience, always a flawed justification, is now gone given that the scheme has expanded.

A socialist stimulus would involve real public investment in green infrastructure and in green energy and public transport in particular. It would invest in green jobs and bring welfare payments back up to a basic minimum of €350 a week. Our stimulus package would be a socialist green new deal and not hand-outs for big business and austerity for the rest.

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