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

I wish to draw attention to something the Ceann Comhairle mentioned at the start of today's debate. He asked all Deputies not to distribute the contents of the budget before the budget speeches were completed. We were not permitted to take the documents out of the room, but the Tánaiste did just that. Before the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform had even stood up to deliver his speech, the Tánaiste had tweeted out large parts of the budget which was contained in the speech that was yet to be given. Perhaps he could not contain his enthusiasm for another Fine Gael Thatcherite budget but I understand that Phil Hogan was previously forced to resign over leaking the details of a budget. Will there be any consequences for the Tánaiste?

The framing of this budget by sections of the media as some sort of giveaway budget is entirely false. It is nothing of the sort. This budget does nothing for working people. It makes people's lives harder with eco-austerity measures while providing giveaways for the rich. This budget learns no lessons from the coronavirus crisis. It pays lip service to the impending climate catastrophe but effectively does nothing to address it. There is a reduced PUP and a Scrooge-like refusal to give a Christmas bonus to those recently on the PUP through no fault of their own. Shame on the Government Deputies, particularly those who pretended to be against these cuts but who will vote them through again like they did last week. There is an increase in the carbon tax, which will hit the most vulnerable the hardest, and an increase in motor tax on old, polluting cars for workers who cannot afford a new car and cannot access public transport. There is a rise of less than 1% in the minimum wage, to a miserable €10.20 an hour for those workers who kept society and the economy moving over the past six months and who were rewarded with a clap on a Thursday night. There is not an extra cent or euro for young people on social welfare, for the core rates of social welfare or for those on the State pension. There is nothing for renters, no ban on evictions and no rent control. There is almost nothing for youth services, which are so important at this time. There is a miserly €2 - one coin - increase in the qualified child payment for under-12s. It is incredible and outrageous to freeze investment in childcare right now, in spite of the crisis which pre-existed Covid and became exposed and worse as a result of it. A completely inadequate €80 million is provided for retrofitting our schools when one quarter of them do not have hot water and 80% do not have the ventilation they need.

There is an air of unreality to the Ministers' speeches about the kind of society in which we are living and the kind of conditions people are facing. I spent some of my day yesterday with a young mother who was waiting for her landlord to come and attempt to evict her illegally. Thanks to the community support she got, the landlord never dared to turn up because he knew she would have been protected by her community who rallied around her. As reported in the papers today, John Johnson and his three sons were not so lucky. They were evicted from their family home of 60 years by a vulture fund on Saturday and the family spent the weekend sleeping out under a bridge. John lost his job in a bar and had his PUP of €350 cut. What is in the budget for them? What giveaway is there for them to ensure we are not faced with similar shocking stories in the next days and weeks? The PUP of €350 is not being restored, evictions are not being stopped and there is no plan to build the 100,000 social houses we actually need to clear the waiting lists.

The reality is that the Government is doing the bare minimum it can get away with. There is no plan here to address the massive inequalities in our society, to fund a zero-Covid strategy or to deal with the climate catastrophe we are facing. In fact, the hiking of the carbon tax will make it more difficult for John and other families like his to get by. The Government is just forcing working people to pay yet another tax to live in a system over which they have no control.

By locking the carbon taxes in from now until 2030, the Government is trying to achieve a situation by 2030 where the extra carbon tax on a tank of heating oil for a family will be €250. That might seem like nothing for someone on a ministerial salary, but for many people in this country, that is a large amount of money. All of the evidence demonstrates that it will not have any serious impact in reducing carbon emissions. In Norway, for example, a carbon tax reduced onshore carbon emissions by only 2%.

It is a very different budget for those at the top of society, who Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael represent. There is a continuation of the help-to-buy scheme, which is not at all about helping people to buy or get access to their first home. It is about helping developers to profit while maintaining high prices, which keeps other people from being able to access the homes that they need. The residential development stamp duty measure is another measure for developers and the friends of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. There is a continuation of the SARP tax relief for some of the highest earners - those on between €75,000 and €500,000 a year - who work for multinationals. It is a special tax relief for them. There is a continuation of the corporate tax haven status of this State, with legalised tax avoidance by multinational corporations and measures such as the knowledge box, which has been extended yet again in this budget. It means that those corporations pay an average of less than 6% of tax on their profits each year, with many paying much less than that, as we have seen. This is a budget to entrench the deep inequalities in our society and it does nothing to fix the vulnerabilities which have been so brutally exposed by the coronavirus.

The underinvestment in public healthcare while private healthcare is promoted over decades is the reason that today we have the third lower number of ICU beds per capitain the OECD. There have been decades of underinvestment and pushing a two-tier model. With this budget, we have been promised an extra 66 new ICU beds. There is no firm commitment to reduce hospital waiting lists. Instead, we have continued outsourcing, privatisation and leasing of private hospitals so that they can profit further when we should be nationalising the private hospitals and building a national health service.

We have the lowest level of investment in education in the OECD, which means that we have the highest pupil-teacher ratio. We see the consequences of that now, with crowded classrooms and inadequate facilities in our schools. The Government says we will go from 26:1 to 25:1. What difference will that make for a crowded classroom?

The continuing housing crisis exposes the consequences of effectively stopping the building of public housing and, in this budget, funnelling more than €2 billion into the pockets of private landlords rather than building public housing. This budget does nothing to challenge any of those issues because it is committed to remaining within the framework of Thatcherism where the market rules and where it is unthinkable, as the Tánaiste, Deputy Varadkar, suggested in his tweet the other day, to tax the rich or the big corporations, where basic public services can be better provided by the private sector.

A zero-Covid strategy should be at the heart of the budget this year. Even in the last week, we have seen the Government reject public health advice because it is committed to short-term private profit at the expense of public health today and the longer-term interests of our society and economy. Instead of the roundabout of lockdown, partial reopening and lockdown again, we should pursue a strategy, driven by public health, to eliminate community transmission of the virus. That means investing in testing and tracing, doubling our testing capacity, investing in community public health schemes and investing in an additional 300 ICU beds to have the capacity that we need, not the 66 that the Government promises us. It means building a proper national health service. It means full sick pay for all, which the Government does nothing about in this budget. It means giving people the capacity to do what is necessary, by restoring the pandemic unemployment payment and by banning evictions and rent increases.

The same applies to tackling the climate crisis. Addressing the Covid crisis actually coincides with taking the measures we really need to tackle the climate crisis. What we have from the Government is the same neoliberal approach which permeates everything it does. Look at the section on climate change in the speech given by the Minister, Deputy Donohoe. The Government pats itself on the back for the climate action Bill, which is nowhere near adequate and has a punchline of a target of pursuing zero carbon emissions by 2050. It is nowhere near enough. It is far too late. An advanced country such as Ireland has to target net zero carbon emissions by 2030. The budget has the carbon tax which is simply eco-austerity. We need a socialist green new deal based on public investment, public ownership and democratic planning. We need investment in free, green and frequent public transport, sustainable agriculture and renewable energy. We need investment in green jobs, including care jobs, and in building a national childcare service, a national health service and a properly funded education system. We need a four-day week or a 30-hour week without loss of pay. We need public ownership of key polluting sectors and democratic planning to transition in a rapid and just way to net zero carbon.

I will demonstrate how that coincides with Covid by taking the example of public transport. Right now, we need to double the number of buses, Luasanna and trains that we have on the road and the tracks. This is needed so that people can socially distance while they are on public transport. We also need that in the medium to long term as part of a strategy to provide free, green and frequent public transport, so that people can get out of their cars and so that the sector with the second most emissions in Ireland, which is transport, can have its emissions substantially reduced. The same applies to retrofitting. People will be asked to spend more time at home. There is almost nothing here from the Government about retrofitting. We have the highest household energy use in the entire European Union and we need a substantial retrofitting plan to be rolled out. The same applies to investment in renewable energy, healthcare and education.

The Government will make a point about where the wealth will come from. We are heading into an enormous economic crisis, the second such crisis in just over a decade. Just like with the last crisis, there will be a blunt question of who will pay. Will it be the rich and the big corporations or will it be working-class people? Will we have another decade of austerity, cuts to public services, an extra tax burden on working people and all its consequences, including rising deprivation, poverty and mental health crises?

It is worth noting that while people worldwide have experienced significant cuts to their income and dislocation of their lives, the enormous wealth in our societies has not simply disappeared. Billionaires worldwide increased their wealth from April to July by over 27%, with a total wealth of over $10 trillion. They got richer by betting on the stock exchange while workers around the world were thrown out of their jobs. The same is the case in Ireland. Take the example of Larry Goodman. He profits every which way. He profited from the meat factories while the virus ran rampant through them and the Government turned a blind eye. He profits from the deal the State made to rent the private hospitals, the details of which have still not been published, despite repeated attempts to get them. He even profits from the renting of the building that the Department of Health sits in.

Total household wealth in Ireland is almost €800 billion. It has increased by more than €170 billion in the last five years. The top 10% control over 50% of it. The top 1% control 15% of it. Corporate profits have exploded. There are many more statistics that could be given. The point is that the rich are extremely rich and are getting richer. Instead of this budget, we should be implementing a Covid tax on the richest in our society.

There is a Europe-wide campaign to do just that, containing four emergency taxes. Applying those to the Irish economy, the amount of money that could be raised is astounding. A 3% tax on corporate profits exceeding €5 billion would raise over €2 billion. That is €2 billion that could be raised easily without touching the income of a single worker or a small or medium business. A 3% wealth tax on the richest 1% of people in Ireland would raise €3.6 billion. A 1% tax on the assets of investment funds and holding companies, excluding pension funds, would raise €22 billion. Finally, increasing the tax on transfers of assets, excluding shares and residential property, would raise €600 million. That is a total of more than €28 billion, which is enough money to really transform or begin the process of transforming our economy and society. It is the kind of money that could be invested in a green new deal with socialist policies.

These are dark and depressing times for many throughout the country. Ordinary people need to see there is a light at the end of the tunnel and not only can we defeat this virus but we can build a better society, where everybody has the right to a home without breaking the bank, there would be an Irish national health service for when it is required and there would be truly free quality education from preschool to university and a living wage for all. This pandemic has highlighted all the inequalities in our society and the problems in our public services. Decades of underfunding have left our health services hanging by a thread and our classrooms among the most overcrowded in Europe.

This should be a wake-up call that we cannot go on this way and there must no going back to the neoliberal model. Instead, we must take on the super-rich tax avoiders, challenge the rack-renting landlords and tackle the big business polluters. We need a socialist economy where the major wealth and resources are in public instead of private hands and are planned democratically to meet the needs of people and our planet. Of course, this Government refuses to do that. It represents those who benefit from this system. The Government is failing to provide people with a real hope for the future or a vision of how we can crush Covid-19 and rebuild better. For that we are going to need a left Government with socialist policies and mass mobilisation from below.

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