Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Today's budget comes at a time like no other, a time of great uncertainty and, for many, hardship. Covid-19 has upended and disrupted the lives of us all.

Táimid ag déileáil leis an cháinaisnéis seo ag am iontach annamh. Seo am ina bhfuil a lán neamhchinnteacht agus do go leor, seo am an chruacháis. Bhí tionchar ag Covid-19 orainn uilig agus tá ár saol bun os cionn mar gheall air sin.

It has impacted people in different ways. Citizens with disabilities face unprecedented challenges, with many at breaking point. Families have seen their incomes drop and they worry how they will cover their bills at the end of the month. Our health service, underfunded and mismanaged by Fine Gael for a decade, is under severe pressure like never before. Businesses are fighting for their very survival. This budget needed to respond to this and the continuing threat posed by Brexit by protecting workers and families as they face the continued threat of Covid-19. This budget needed to provide certainty - certainty that their incomes will not fall off a cliff, certainty that the Government will do all it can to protect their jobs, and certainty that our health service has the capacity to weather the storms ahead. This budget has failed to provide that certainty. It repeats a pattern of behaviour that has marked this Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael Government since it took power – indecisive, unprepared, too slow to act and lacking the ambition this moment demands.

The Government will defend this budget with worn-out excuses and will say it is all it can afford. It will say it cannot tackle the major cracks in our society just at this time and that we must wait. However, not only is that not good enough, it is simply not true. A decade ago, taxpayers bailed out the banks to the tune of €64 billion, picking up the pieces after Fianna Fáil torpedoed our economy and wrecked the public finances. Today, we had an opportunity to do something very different - to bail out workers and families at a time of great uncertainty, to seize this moment by permanently increasing capacity in our hospitals and tackling the housing crisis once and for all, and to rebuild an economy that is stronger, fairer and better.

Bhí an deis againn inniu rud neart difriúil a dhéanamh. Bhí an deis againn lámh chuidithe a thabhairt d'oibrithe ag am na neamhchinnteachta agus geilleagar na tíre seo a atógáil ar bhealach a bheadh níos láidre, níos córa agus níos fearr.

The risk is not that we do too much, it is that we do too little, and we can see that in the Government's plan. Indeed, close to €6 billion is unallocated in the Government's plan because it does not know what to do. Today, the Government should have tackled core areas, such as unaffordable childcare costs, underfunded disability services, a dysfunctional housing market and a healthcare system that is crying out for significant investment. Failures in these areas by successive Governments have undermined our resilience and have limited our ability to combat the virus and weather the storm.

Nowhere is this more true than in our health service. Our hospitals and healthcare staff are under immense pressure. A decade of underfunding, mismanagement and neglect under Fine Gael has left them in a vulnerable position. The Government cannot say it was not warned. As far back as 2009, the recommendations were clear. We had 289 critical care beds and we were told we needed 579 by this year. How many do we have today? We have 280. Instead of increasing the number of beds over a decade of Fine Gael Government, we have entered 2020 with fewer critical care beds than we had a decade ago.

Limited capacity in our hospitals has undermined our ability to respond to this virus. What is the Minister planning to deliver for 2021? We are told there will be 66 ICU beds, which is an increase of only 41 on the current number as many of the figures announced are the result of double counting. This increase is nowhere near enough. The same can be said of acute beds. Many of those announced today are already in place. Real ambition was needed. We needed an additional 100 ICU beds, as Sinn Féin pledged, and an additional 600 acute beds, which have brought the total to more than the 2020 figure of 1,800. That is the type of ambition and support those who rely on those services and our front-line workers and doctors needed but did not get from Government today. Our plan would have addressed the capacity deficiencies and regional inequalities in access to healthcare. The Government plan has not done that. Our health system needed far more. Patients and healthcare workers deserve more. Today was the day to turn fine words and applause into real action.

Today also could have been the day to end two-tier pay in the public sector. This is the day it could have come to an end. Despite all the fine words from Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil and the Green Party for our nurses, teachers and other public sector workers, they could not find it in themselves to make resources available to end pay inequality for front-line workers. That was the least they deserved today. Sinn Féin would have taken a different course. We would have expanded and ring-fenced resources for extra cancer care and mental health and would have provided funding for the critical and acute care beds we need. We also would have recruited additional staff, nurses, doctors and allied health professionals to ensure our hospitals are safely staffed. Today's health budget leaves our patients and staff vulnerable. That is the unfortunate reality.

As I said in my opening remarks, the pandemic has affected our people in different ways. It has affected no one more than our citizens with disabilities. These are the forgotten people of this pandemic. These citizens needed relief and sanctuary today but what did they get? They got an increase in funding to reopen disability services, which is welcome. I commend all of those families and providers who worked so hard over recent times to bring this about. This funding is long overdue. It is an indictment of this Government and successive governments that they were left for so long and had to fight so hard. We need to get to a point at which people with disabilities and their families do not have to battle the State and the Government for their rights every single time. The Ministers could have done a lot more today. Much more needed to be done. Today must be seen as only a first step in providing the supports those with disabilities and the disability sector require and for which they are crying out. What we have seen over successive years is not a vision of a real republic but a vision of people who are vulnerable and who need support from the State being left behind and abandoned.

Covid-19 has caused an earthquake for our economy. In the second quarter of this year, the State suffered the second-highest level of job losses in Europe. In September, our unemployment rate stood at 15% and more than one in three of our young people was out of work. The pandemic's impact has been felt hardest by young people, low-paid workers and those who, before this crisis, were just keeping their heads above water. Workers and families have faced sky-high rents and unaffordable childcare costs and their incomes have been squeezed by a high cost of living. Thousands upon thousands have now lost their jobs or have seen their incomes slashed.

Instead of protecting these workers and families, this Government has left them vulnerable. As the Minister, Deputy McGrath, was signing off on ministerial orders to give super junior Ministers a pay rise of more than €17,000, his colleagues across the room were putting pen to paper to introduce regulations to cut the pandemic unemployment payment. This shows how out of touch this Government has become after only 100 days in office. Some on €135,000 were being given an extra €330 per week while their Cabinet colleagues stated that €350 is too much to give people who have suffered a shock to their incomes through no fault of their own and who have lost their jobs mainly because of the public health restrictions imposed by this Government. It is wrong.

The cuts to the pandemic unemployment payment should be reversed and the top rate payment brought to €350. The Government has today made those cuts permanent. Thousands are set to see their incomes cut by more than 40% as a result of this budget. Sinn Féin would have given certainty to these workers and families. These are people who wonder how they are going to make it through 2021 without work. We would have reversed the cut to the pandemic unemployment payment and ensured the cut planned for 1 February would not have gone ahead. We would also have brought the top rate back to €350 and ensured that households would not have seen their incomes fall off a cliff as a result of the pandemic but would have instead been supported, protected and coveted during this challenging period.

Too many pensioners are seeing their weekly fixed incomes eroded as a result of the cost of living crisis. The Minister decided in today's budget to leave thousands of them with no relief. They have been given no increase in their weekly pension payment, not even a single euro. Sinn Féin would have increased the pension for all, including by an additional €5 for those living alone. This Government is out of touch and unable to fathom the reality of life for those who rely on State pensions to get by. The Minister's reluctant decision, forced by Sinn Féin, to suspend the increase in the State pension age from 66 to 67 is simply not good enough. The Government will not even give pensioners certainty that they will be able to retire at the age of 66. The Minister has said that a report will have to be done and that Government will look at the issue. He has pushed the matter down the road and said the age may go back up to 67 next year. That is no good. People need certainty. They do not need certainty that the age will increase to 67 or 66 but that they will be able to retire at the age of 65 and draw a State pension at that time. That is Sinn Féin's position and we will accept nothing less.

Tá an ceart ag oibrithe éirí as agus pinsean a bheith acu ag aois 65. Ní ghlacfaidh Sinn Féin lena dhath níos lú ná seo. Under Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Green Party, thousands of 65-year-olds have been forced onto jobseeker's payments after a lifetime of work. The Government saw fit to ignore the most vulnerable people across the State, including families on their knees financially and households depending on social welfare. It just forgot about them. It could have acted on our proposals. Sinn Féin's budget proposals would have delivered a €5 increase across the board and a €10 increase for people with disabilities.

As the Minister's Government has made cuts to the pandemic unemployment payment irreversible, it has ploughed ahead with a 29% increase in carbon tax. The Department of Finance recognises that this measure is regressive and that it hits poorer households, rural areas, and single-parent families hardest. It is clear that it will not change their behaviour; it will only make them poorer. Combined with increases in the electricity public service obligation levy and price hikes from energy providers, this is not the just transition we were promised.

At the same time, the Government has hiked up motor tax on older and diesel and petrol cars. Sinn Féin believes that a transition to electric cars is an essential step in moving towards a greener and cleaner economy but this increase in motor tax will affect those who can least afford a tax hike - those in rural areas who, due to underfunding in rural transport, are heavily depend on their car. Coupled with changes in vehicle registration tax, these decisions will disproportionately benefit wealthy drivers while punishing those who cannot afford electric vehicles. This is not a carrot-and-stick approach; it is a stick-and-stick approach.

With bills piling up and mortgage and rent payments due to the bank or the landlord, families face the threat of increased household debt. They needed relief and could have got it under this budget. Time and again, I have called out the price gouging of the insurance industry and the banks and called for a ban on dual pricing and the unjustified charging of additional interest on mortgage breaks. These things should never have happened. If there was ever a time for a zero-tolerance policy approach to price gouging for insurance companies, banks and energy providers, it was today but time and again this Government has done nothing. It has actually done worse; it has sided with those big industries and vested interests rather than with ordinary people. That was evident in its failure to protect mortgage holders impacted by the pandemic. Banks were charging additional interest during emergency payment breaks and while other governments in Europe acted to stop this, even bringing in legislation to protect their citizens, this Government did nothing and gave the banks a free ride once again.

At the same time, the Government has continued to allow loan sharks to hit struggling families with interest rates as high as 187% annual percentage rate, APR. The cost of living had already cut through the incomes of families before this pandemic. Covid-19 and Government inaction has made that cost of living even sharper. Today was the day that we could have turned a new leaf and tackled this situation head-on. That is especially the case in the area of childcare, for which parents are paying some of the highest costs in Europe. The policies of Sinn Féin would have cut the cost of childcare next year by one third and could do the same the following year. We would have immediately increased the pay of our childcare workers to the living wage. It is the least they deserve. The Government, instead, has completely ignored this sector.

The pandemic has exposed the market's failure to measure the real value of work and care in our society. Those once labelled as unskilled were recognised as essential, and rightly so. For Sinn Féin, those front-line workers are on our shop floors, in our care homes and in our childcare facilities, and they are our cleaners, our hospitality workers and many other workers. They have always been essential workers and for far too long they have been undervalued. Essential workers are more likely to be found working in our care homes and on our shop floors than in the boardrooms of banks or investment companies.

Despite that fact, vested interests have always had access to the corridors of power over ordinary people and their representatives. If we needed proof of that, we only need to look at what happened last month. I refer to the former Fine Gael Minister of State and Deputy who left the Department of Finance in June and then took up a post as the CEO of a financial lobby group three months later. That was a group which lobbied that same Minister of State to extend the special assignee relief programme, which is a little-known tax relief that allows some of the highest income earners in the State, earning salaries of up to €1 million, to reduce their personal income tax by €111,000. Their tax rate is being reduced to 28%, when every Tom, Dick, Harry and Sheila pays 40% in tax.

Are we surprised that the Government has extended that tax break in the budget today? No, we are not at all, because that is what this Government does. Perhaps one of its members is auditioning for a new role in one of the lobby groups. Former members of Fine Gael already hold posts as CEOs of organisations representing the bankers and the funds industry, so perhaps one of them is thinking of going into the area of insurance in the future. The reality is that we need to compare this situation with how low-income employees are paid. I refer to a miserly increase of 10 cent in the minimum wage. How mean-spirited is it possible to be? There is a 10 cent, or 1%, increase at a time when so many people are under pressure. What message does that send to those doing such essential services? It sends a message of contempt. Taispeánann an phaindéim seo dúinn cé chomh tábhachtach agus atá na hoibrithe riachtanacha. Thaispeáin an Rialtas an buíochas atá aige dóibh agus ardú 10 cent tugtha ar an íosphá. Is masla é seo.

Jobs lost as a result of the public health measures have been concentrated among low-paid workers. This is seen especially in areas of hospitality, retail and tourism. These workers and small businesses have struggled with rolling closures and reduced trading activity. If we are to protect our economy, we must ensure that as many jobs and businesses are saved as possible. To that end, wage supports are absolutely crucial. On 1 September, the Government introduced its employee wage subsidy scheme, EWSS. It is a scheme that is not fit for purpose. It locks out 150,000 low-income workers and gives no support to the employer if his or her employees earn less than €151.50. It is a scheme that has seen the supports for employers being cut by nearly 50%, with highest subsidy now available at €203 per week, and it covers as little as 35% of weekly wages for workers in sectors that are struggling to survive.

The Minister has extended that scheme today, a scheme which fails to meet the needs of struggling businesses, and has proposed no plans to increase the level of wage supports for those most highly impacted sectors. It is a scheme that will increase unemployment in the months ahead unless it is changed. Sinn Féin's proposed wage subsidy scheme would have provided the necessary level of wage support and targeted supports at highly impacted sectors. It would do that by guaranteeing 85% of take-home pay for workers on the minimum wage, with wage subsidies of up to €410 per week for highly impacted sectors and €300 per week for sectors moderately impacted by the pandemic. This would have saved jobs, supported struggling businesses, reduced the number of people in receipt of social welfare payments in the future and made good economic sense. What the Government has announced today fails to do that.

What was needed by our SMEs, which employ more than 1 million people in this State, was certainty. I do not refer to certainty that they will all survive, because no Government can provide that level of certainty. The SMEs, however, needed certainty that they had a Government that was on their side, and a Government that would do everything in its power to ensure that those businesses had the best chance of survival. People working in those companies needed to know that they had a Government that would do everything it could to ensure that their jobs were secure, but that has not been done today and huge uncertainty has been created for businesses and their employees throughout the State.

Since the onset of this crisis, the Government's response to small businesses has been one of delay. Our small businesses and their workers have suffered as a result of that delay. Take the Tánaiste's flagship project, the credit guarantee scheme, which the Government has talked up since this crisis started as a €2 billion financial lifeline to struggling businesses. It is a scheme that got up and running five months after better schemes were introduced in Germany, Britain and elsewhere. The Government boasts of €2 billion being available. To date, only 128 loans have been approved, with a total value of €6 million. It is not €2 billion, but €6 million. That is less than 3% of the funding available under the scheme, six months into this crisis. This delay is damaging businesses and costing jobs and it is a delay that has characterised other policy choices by the Government.

Today, the Government finally adopted Sinn Féin's proposal to reduce the rate of VAT from 13.5% to 9% for the hospitality and tourism sector. We welcome that, but it is a support that comes late in the day and should have been introduced during the summer. The Government has failed to provide a grant support package for businesses that face the threat of closure as a result of public health restrictions. Instead, it has introduced a compensation scheme that will run out at the end of March. This support is contingent, insufficient and time limited. We know that this pandemic will not end in March, unfortunately. The reality, unless the Government allows for these allowances to be claimed twice, is that this is not grant aid, it is just a measure that will assist businesses in respect of cash flow. That is welcome, but what we need is significant grant support for these businesses.

What our small businesses needed today was not a contingency or a maybe. They needed a guarantee. We can see this throughout the budget, where there have been many figures that will bamboozle us, but nearly €6 billion of those funds are unallocated. The Government, even at this stage, does not know the supports needed for businesses. Businesses are making decisions right here and right now regarding whether they will keep going or give up, and they needed a level of certainty in that regard. They needed to hear that there was going to be a ramping up of the wage subsidy schemes, because the Government had got that wrong and the pandemic is going to be with us for longer than anticipated. The Government should have stated that it needed to support these businesses and the jobs they create. Those businesses needed to hear that the Government was going to deliver cash injections to businesses to ensure they could deal with their overheads, and not just in respect of issues such as cash flow. Those are the types of guarantees that could have been provided to businesses, but that was not done.

Sinn Féin would have acted differently, by implementing a support package that our small businesses could rely on throughout 2021 to compensate for the cost of any future restrictions. We would have guaranteed €25,000 and €12,000 in support grants for affected businesses for the duration of 2021. The Government has given no commitment to provide a commercial rates waiver in 2021. That is startling. All that is being done is extending the current waiver for another three months of this year, but that simply does not cut it. What should have been done was the extension of the waiver for a further six months, into 2021, which would have given certainty to these businesses that have been so badly affected. A tourism and hospitality voucher should also have been rolled out, at a rate of €200 per adult and €100 per child, which would have boosted demand, increased trading and supported the balance sheets of small businesses in the hospitality and tourism sector. That could have been done instead of the dog's dinner of a scheme in the form of the stay-and-spend initiative, which simply will not cut it.

These stimulus measures I have outlined would have increased the chances of firms surviving, and therefore the chances of jobs surviving. With cuts to wage supports having now been confirmed into next year, and with no certainty of grant supports for businesses struggling as a result of public health restrictions, the Government is going to lead us into a winter jobs crisis.

Today was an opportunity not only to protect jobs but to create them. A decade of Fine Gael in power created a housing crisis that has not gone away, as well as road and rail networks and infrastructure in desperate need of upgrading to connect our regions and communities. Now is the time to significantly increase public investment, at a time of historically low interest rates when even the IMF is calling on advanced economies to ramp up capital expenditure through sustainable borrowing. We would have seized this opportunity and increased capital investment by an additional €2.5 billion. The Government has announced €600 million extra in capital investment. That is a paltry figure given the need to stimulate the economy and the needs in other areas, particularly housing. Our package would in itself have created 26,000 jobs by investing in our regions, upgrading our transport network and delivering the biggest public housing programme in the history of the State.

This investment was nowhere more needed than in the housing market. Despite a demand for change by the people in the election in February, this Government is determined to continue with the failed housing policies of the past. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael created a housing crisis that has locked a generation out of secure and affordable accommodation, during which rents increased by more than 31% since 2016 and which resulted in the highest increase in homelessness in the history of the State. Renters continue to hand a third of their pay package over to their landlords monthly. Families and couples are struggling to find homes as they simply cannot afford them. We were told that things were going to be different now that we have a Fianna Fáil Minister for Housing, Planning and Local Government and that Fianna Fáil would tackle the housing crisis but it is very clear today that this crisis will remain with us for as long as this Government is in power. Níl a dhath anseo inniu chun déileáil leis an ngéarchéim tithíochta a chruthaigh Fine Gael. Ar an mhalairt, tá sé anois á shoiléiriú ag an Rialtas.

At his party's conference, the Tánaiste and leader of Fine Gael, Deputy Varadkar, said that Fianna Fáil was a party with no ideas, no policies and no alternatives. That was true then and is definitely true today. Where are its big ideas? Its big idea is to extend the help to buy scheme, which will push up the prices of homes for first-time buyers. Over 40% of people who availed of the scheme since it was introduced already had the required deposit to secure a mortgage. This is not an affordable housing scheme; it is a sop to developers. It does not encourage them to reduce house prices but to increase them. That is the reality and the Government knows it. Today, the Government has decided it wants to pump more money into this scheme and therefore into the pockets of developers. This is the best that Fianna Fáil has managed to come up with after being out of government for a decade. It would be embarrassing if the stakes were not so high. This is the affordable housing that the Minister, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, has been planning for four years. He will try to explain himself but the reality is he needs to try again and he needs to try a hell of a lot harder.

Our broken housing system was exposed by this pandemic. Not only should this budget have been a radical departure from the failed policies of the past, but it should have provided immediate protections for renters who are vulnerable in the present. The Minister's first act in the area of housing was to strip away the protection renters had from eviction during this time of great uncertainty. Shame on him. Today, he has delivered just €110 million in funding for affordable housing, which is to fund an as yet undecided shared equity loan scheme and 400 cost-rental homes. The Government has not even seen fit to invest such a paltry sum into genuinely affordable working homes for working people. It speaks volumes that this is the level of injection involved. So much for this Minister for housing, who made so many promises to deliver genuinely affordable homes for working people to rent and buy.

It gets worse. The Minister has secured funding for just 593 real social homes above what is already committed to in 2021. This is an insult to the thousands of homeless families and tens of thousands of people languishing on local authority waiting lists. Rents will not decrease or be frozen under this Government. Things could have been done differently. This was the time to reduce rents through a refundable tax credit, to freeze rents and to give people certainty. It was the time to build the largest public housing building programme in the history of the State, delivering 20,000 social affordable and cost-rental units in 2021. Again, this Government has failed to act.

At a time of great uncertainty for workers and families, the budget needed to respond by protecting them and giving them certainty that their incomes would be supported, that the Government would do all it could to protect jobs and businesses and that our hospitals and healthcare workers would be equipped to weather the storms and challenges ahead. This Government has failed to provide that certainty. It has cut the pandemic unemployment payment, slashed supports under the wage subsidy scheme, removed the ban on evictions and failed to secure an extension for mortgage breaks without additional interest being charged. It has failed to give certainty to struggling businesses and their workers. It needed to provide them with supports on which they could rely to help to weather the storm - not as a maybe but as a guarantee. It could have done that by introducing a wage subsidy scheme that was fit for purpose and grants of €25,000 and €12,000 that would be delivered not as a contingency or a maybe but as a certainty. It should have provided certain supports for businesses, employers and workers. Failure to do this has heightened the risk of job losses and permanent business closures.

While no one could have predicted this pandemic, our public services were ill-equipped and under-resourced after decades of neglect under Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. That neglect has left our hospitals, healthcare workers and patients vulnerable. This Government has failed to address that neglect and failed to step up to the challenge. It has failed to deliver on the ambition and new direction that is needed. It has fallen back on the tired, failed policies of the past. This is not the budget that Sinn Féin would have delivered. Sinn Féin would have provided certainty to workers and their families. Where we need ambition and vision, we have gotten more of the same, papering over the cracks and trying to limp on. This is simply not good enough for the times we are in. Today was the time to give certainty and set out a new path to rebuild our economy in a fairer, stronger and better way. Unfortunately, this Government has, predictably, failed to deliver that and give that certainty.

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