Gary Gannon (Dublin Central, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

My time is short so I will get straight into it. Yesterday was a fairly extraordinary day and €18 billion is an extraordinary figure for a small island nation. The insertion of €18 billion into the economy over the next year should and will have positive ramifications but I cannot help but feel, now that the dust has settled somewhat, that yesterday's budget was a lost opportunity. The budget will help us keep our heads above water and survive in many ways, but nothing about the measures announced yesterday was in any way transformative. When the dust has settled on this and people are talking about the incredible year that was 2020 and the budget of that year, they will say there were no lasting ramifications. This budget will have no legacy because the measures taken are short term, near sighted and designed with containment in mind rather than the advancement of who we are as a society.

The problems that existed in Ireland pre-pandemic, and the reasons many of us were elected to serve in this House, were childcare, the unavailability of affordable housing, no protections for renters and the abysmal state of our healthcare system. None of those issues will be addressed by yesterday's budget and the €18 billion insertion into our economy. That will be a shame. Yesterday's budget simply lacked ambition. There was no ambition in childcare, very limited ambition in housing and protection of renters and nothing that will push us towards universal healthcare.

In education, an area about which I am passionate, we have a chronically underfunded education system. Some of the announcements over the past decade and beyond and even some of those made yesterday also lacked ambition. It was heralded that we will bring class sizes down from the highest in Europe to a pupil to teacher ratio of 25:1. Is that the extent of our ambition? Are we going to put our hands in the air and say that is a success story or that improvements will look like 25 pupils in a class with a teacher and an SNA or two? That is not progress and never will be.

One of the more worthy aspects of the budget was the announcement of 900 additional SNAs. That is incredible. SNAs are the champions of our education system, but what about the 18,000 SNAs who are already there and the conditions they are asked to work under? Their jobs have no permanence, we have not yet professionalised their profession, and we do not pay them enough. None of that was addressed yesterday. None of the measures even came close.

I heard nothing said yesterday about the digital divide. Would it have been too ambitious to say that, with that €18 billion, we will aspire to get a laptop into the hands of every child who needs one? In that way, should the pandemic worsen and should we have to close our schools like has been done in the North, at least our students can learn at home in the manner they were not able to a few months ago.

There were some other incredibly poor measures in the budget. One of the issues about which we are passionate in the Social Democrats is the eradication of child poverty. We brought forward a motion on that a few weeks ago, which was voted down. Yesterday, to address the issue of child poverty, our Government provided an extra €2 per week per child under the age of 12, which miraculously increases to an extra €5 should that child happen to be over the age of 12. There are 90,000 children in this country at risk of severe poverty and the Government is giving them an extra €8 a month. It expects them to be happy about that and is clapping itself on the back for it. That is an extraordinary failure of ambition and an extraordinarily poor way of spending €18 billion. It just lacks ambition.

When I think about the problems of yesterday's budget, I cannot help but come back to the ideology that lies behind it.

When I think about the people who were standing there yesterday presenting the budget and how tightly they linked themselves to the idea of centrist politics, yesterday's budget encapsulated the problem of those who aspire only to hold the line of centrism. When all a person can do with his or her politics is to hold the line, that person is not seeking to advance who we are as a society. Yesterday we had that opportunity. We could borrow and we borrowed an appropriate amount, yet we have done nothing to address the permanent problems that we have seen in Irish society, and that was a failure of ambition. It was a failure of centrist politics. When people talk about that €18 billion in years to come, they will say it was a wasted opportunity, which it was.

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