Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

Faced with the really dire crisis produced by Covid-19, which is a health crisis, an economic crisis and a social crisis, we needed a budget that would support decisive action to defeat the threat of Covid-19 to public health and to support the workers, livelihoods and families most severely impacted as a result of the economic fallout of Covid-19. This budget has failed on both counts. The headline figures sound great but as soon as one looks into the detail it becomes clear that, despite significant increases in expenditure, the budget does not actually do what is necessary to deal with the threat of Covid-19.

The decision not to restore the pandemic unemployment payment, PUP, and the wage subsidy scheme, which the Government has cut, is nothing short of a disgrace. It is a very dangerous mistake as infection rates rise and as tens or hundreds of thousands of people once again face potentially losing their employment and jobs if further restrictions are imposed. It seriously undermines the collective social solidarity that we need to deal with the threat of Covid-19. It was bad enough that people had to endure months of hardship, lost income and unemployment as a result of public health restrictions on a payment of €350, but to expect those whose particular jobs mean that their incomes are on the floor or their employment has ceased altogether, to continue through the crisis, along with others who may join them as a result of further health restrictions, in an even worse financial position is unacceptable and disgraceful. How are people supposed to pay rent, mortgage payments or bills if their income is slashed or their opportunities for employment massively reduced?

I have mentioned people in particular sectors, such as taxi drivers, musicians, those who work in the arts and events sector, ad nauseam. Such people who were getting the PUP, which has now been cut, have no prospect of returning to work at any time in the future or of their sectors fully recovering as long as the pandemic is with us. They will have to continue on while getting reduced payments.

While there is talk of an income subsidy, which such people may be able to receive while earning other income, there is a problem. The first is that people are on different levels of payment. Some are on €200, others are on €250 and others are on €300. There will be a cap of €120 on how much such people can earn in a week and it is not clear whether those who reach that cap will lose their entire payment. In any event, there is virtually no work out there and these people will actually have to survive on these reduced payments. On top of that, they will now have to pay additional vehicle registration tax if their vehicles are old, additional car tax and additional fuel costs as a result of the decision to increase the carbon tax. These are all regressive taxes which further increase the economic financial pressure on people who have already had their incomes and employment devastated. I put it to the Government that it is cruel and unfair to do that to the people who have been hardest hit by the pandemic.

It is also a dangerous undermining of the principle of all of us being in this together and the social solidarity that we need to address the Covid-19 threat. That is even more the case when we are likely to face more restrictions in the weeks to come.

I turn now to the disgraceful decision to lift the mortgage moratorium and the ban on evictions. If it was not justified to have banks crawling all over the backs of people who had lost their jobs and incomes in March and April, how is it justified to do that now, when many of those people are in the same, or even a worse, financial position than they were a few months ago? How could it possibly be justified to make people homeless? It is unconscionable. The public health threat is now very close to being every bit as bad as it was in March and April, and it is heading in a very negative direction. How can it be justified, therefore, in any shape or form, to allow people to be made homeless by landlords? It is absolutely unacceptable. The Government should immediately reinstate the mortgage moratorium and the ban on evictions, and guarantee that nobody will be made homeless during the pandemic, although of course nobody should face homelessness at any time in any society that calls itself civilised.

Moving on to address the housing measures in the budget, the headline figures sound impressive. Then we compare what the Government is promising now with what was in the Rebuilding Ireland plan of the former Minister for Housing, Planning and Local Government, Deputy Eoghan Murphy. Lo and behold, we find that it is the same plan and nothing has really changed. The budget statement, in the fine print beyond the headlines, states that there will be an extra 15,000 housing assistance payment, HAP, tenancies and 800 rental accommodation scheme, RAS, tenancies. That will bring us up to a total of 85,000 HAP and RAS tenancies by the end of the year, which will cost us €2.4 billion. That money is going straight into the pockets of private landlords for housing that is not secure and which is crucifying in respect of the cost to taxpayers and the public coffers.

Those landlords can pull out of those HAP and RAS tenancies at any time, as they often do, which will result in plunging those families, in so-called "social housing", into homeless situations. Many of the people in emergency accommodation now are people who have been put out of HAP and RAS tenancies repeatedly because of landlords pulling out of those deals. That figure of 85,000 HAP and RAS tenancies, and the extraordinary and shocking figure of €2.4 billion in costs, is exactly the same figure that was in the original Rebuilding Ireland plan. In other words, we are continuing with the failed policies of relying on private landlords to deliver housing instead of the direct construction of public housing.

There is also some incredible spin here. People doing their mathematics can work out one aspect very quickly. In the budget statement, we read that €500 million is going to deliver 9,500 newly-constructed units, which works out at €52,000 per housing unit. It is not possible to build a house of any description for €52,000. What does that figure mean, therefore? It means we are not getting 9,500 units, which has been generally the case because none of these targets has ever been met. Instead, this is linked to the recommitment to the Land Development Agency, LDA. Its wholemodus operandiis to essentially privatise public land or involve private finance in the delivery of social housing on public land, where a great deal of that land is given over to the private sector to profiteer from public housing. That is worrying.

We go on then to the critical issue of healthcare. We again see eye-watering figures on one level regarding increased expenditure. Then we look at the details, and we can see that there are 280 intensive care unit, ICU, beds now, which are perilously close to being overrun if the infection rates of Covid-19 continue to increase. That total is, by the way, less than the 350 ICU beds in surge capacity we had in April, when our ICUs were largely overrun, but in this plan we are planning to go up to only 320 beds in permanent capacity. That is, however, much less than the 560 ICU beds the HSE told us we needed in 2009, before the onset of Covid-19. We are far short, therefore, of having the ICU capacity we need to deal with any significant surge in Covid-19 cases, a surge we will almost certainly face in the months to come.

In the winter plan, we continue to have €58 million going to the private hospitals to rent, essentially, private healthcare capacity at extortionate costs. If we are really going to deal with this crisis, however, there should be no question of there being a two-tier health system or any private health provider profiteering from the situation. We should instead be taking the capacity of those private hospitals directly into public control so that we have a single-tier, integrated health response to Covid-19. If we drive down the virus as we need to do, to get back to some sort of normality, it will be crucial that we have a testing and tracing regime able to control the situation and to keep us ahead of the virus. That would mean moving way beyond the 100,000 tests we are doing now and up to about 200,000, and resourcing that capacity, and having a tracing regime in place that works and that is properly staffed.

I will give a shocker of a statement now. We got figures from Mr. Paul Reid at a leaders' briefing recently regarding the permanent recruitment of tracers into the HSE to replace those who had been seconded in. I then got an email later from someone who has just been recruited into one of these new positions as a tracer. What sort of contract is being offered? Unbelievably, those new recruits, who are going to be our tracers, are getting zero-hour contracts. They have no guarantee of the hours they will work, they will not get hours unless they are needed and they will get no sick pay, but will be put on the PUP payment if they get sick from Covid-19. That is absolutely disgraceful, and that is the way we are treating the people we urgently need to recruit into the testing regime we require to deal with Covid-19. That is outrageous.

Spending in the area of mental healthcare has a figure of €38 million given for extra funding, at a time when people are going through a terrible time in respect of their mental health. That amount might sound good on paper, until we discover that if we added that amount to the entire budget the actual proportion of the health budget to be spent on mental health will be less, in percentage terms, in 2021 than it was in 2020. That is also, of course, against a background of where we spend only 5% of our health budget on mental healthcare, as opposed to an average across Europe of about 12%. That is what we need to deal properly with the mental health problems people face and to provide the necessary supports and resources. That is even more the case in this situation, where we are facing the ongoing impact of Covid-19.

I will mention some other aspects of the budget. There seems to be a significant drop in the allocation going to Department of Business, Enterprise and Innovation when we look at the Estimates, and that is particularly worrying when we think about the grants needed for lone traders, the self-employed and the SMEs. They are still not getting the grant support they need to sustain them through the current crisis. I refer to the cost of rents, insurance and all the other overheads faced by small lone traders, such as taxi drivers, musicians, arts workers and many others. Those people have ongoing costs, but little to no income coming in and we have not got significant grant support for them. I would also like it noted that the community development budget has dropped by 16% compared to 2020, which is incredible when we consider we need more support for communities in the face of the impact of Covid-19.

The current expenditure for higher education had been also reduced by about 14%, which seems amazing. I do not even understand how that is the case after looking at the Estimates.

This failure to restore the PUP and the wage subsidy scheme and to provide grant supports to the particular sectors that desperately need them contrasts with the continued handout of Government money to the pampered sections of Irish society, mostly in the form of enormous tax reliefs, which is barely spoken about. That is the outrageous thing. We all knew there had to be significant increases in spending in order to deal with the current crisis and the Government has made the decision to finance that through borrowing. Let us be absolutely clear. Faced with the need to spend, I would rather borrow than not spend, but it has been suggested that there are no alternatives to borrowing money, which ordinary working people in this country will ultimately have to pay back. We remember the bitter price we paid for that in the past. There is an alternative, which is to look at the enormous wealth and profits being made by a tiny, pampered and super-wealthy minority in this country.

The latest profit figures for the corporate sector in this country show €180 billion in profits, and corporations are only paying about 5% tax, not the 12.5% they should be paying. If we just brought that up to 12.5%, which would still be one of the lowest levels of corporation tax anywhere in the western world or even the world, we would get around an extra €10 billion and they would still be paying an incredibly low level of tax. That would save us having to borrow money while redistributing some of that profit. Some of these sectors have done extraordinarily well during the pandemic, most notably the pharmaceutical sector and those involved in medical equipment. Some of the big IT companies have made super profits over the course of the last year. Surely it would be fair to get them to make a fair contribution to the tax system to show the social solidarity which underpins the supposed principle of us all being in this together. The truth is that some are making super profits while others, who have lost their jobs and employment through no fault of their own, are on their knees financially and are facing a very uncertain and difficult future.

Similarly, the Government could look at tax reliefs like carrying losses forward, which allows banks to essentially write off all their profits against tax for the foreseeable future. These tax reliefs should be ended and the money redirected towards ordinary working families, particularly those who are struggling as a result of the Covid-19 crisis.

The Government could also have looked at a number of other potential areas. Those who have benefited from property development and land speculation, which was fuelled by Government policy, could and should have idle site and vacant property taxes imposed on them in order to address the scandal of land hoarding and empty properties lying around in every town and city in this country. These properties could be used to provide desperately needed housing for people who need it, but also to provide the sort of emergency capacity we need in our massively overcrowded schools. The Minister is crowing because he is going to reduce the ratio of students to staff in our schools by one, but we have the most overcrowded classrooms in western Europe, which makes those classrooms and the teachers who work in them far more vulnerable to Covid-19 infection. We should be aiming for a staff to student ratio like that of Denmark, which is not 1:25 but 1:10, and we should be making the necessary investment through the recruitment of teachers to reduce class sizes.

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