Damien English (Meath West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank my colleagues for affording me the time to address a few issues in the context of the budget. I will focus mainly on my Department.

This is a pro-jobs budget, which is what we need if we are to keep businesses open and jobs in place once the various restrictions are lifted. This budget will show our business community that there are supports to help them get them through Covid and Brexit and that they will be able to re-employ their staff, reopen and grow their respective sectors. I welcome these supports, which build on those that we announced in May and July. They recognise that more than €20 billion of taxpayers' money was committed to the jobs and business agendas. While this is one of the largest budgets ever where the country is concerned, it also has a major focus on business and jobs by providing life support for certain businesses that are under restriction. Through PUP, it provides people who cannot return to work life support so that we can get them back to work eventually. It also sets aside more than €22 billion for investment in our health services in order to protect the country, help us deal with Covid, improve the health services and put them in a stronger position. We are trying to protect the economy and allow it to regrow so that we will once again be in a strong position to raise the taxes we need from the economy, employment and business if we are to upgrade those services that we want to invest in in the years ahead. This is a strong budget in that regard, as it must be.

Our Department will receive an extra €136 million in our direct line budget and we will be able to tap into an extra €100 million from the recovery fund next year. People will say that there is a great deal of uncertainty about. That is why, in an unprecedented move, more than €5 billion is being set aside in unallocated expenditure. There will be €3.5 billion plus in the recovery fund, which will be used to fund various business and jobs schemes and initiatives as the year rolls on. In terms of health and social protection, more than €2 billion will be set aside as a contingency fund. We are well placed. While we want to be optimistic about getting through Covid-19 quickly, we must recognise that a budget must be prudent, take the pessimistic view about what might happen with Brexit and Covid and set aside the requisite resources. Naturally, we hope to be in a strong position to grow the economy in 2021 and 2022 to give us the resources we need if we are to get the public finances out of a deficit position and grow services.

The VAT reduction to 9% in respect of the hospitality sector is very important. The new CRSS will be a major support to businesses that are under restrictions and whose turnovers are down to 20% or less. The €3.4 billion recovery fund will give us the firepower to react as the year progresses. We have committed more than €10 billion to capital infrastructure, which is a matter that we touched on in earlier debates. During the financial crisis ten years ago, we did not have that capital financing available to us. Thanks to the long-term planning of the past four or five years, we are in a position this year to invest more than €10 billion in capital infrastructure. This will create jobs in the short term and strengthen the economy and the country in the long term. Investing in education, hospitals, roads and rail will stand to the country in the long run. It is important that we do this.

I wish to raise a matter that affects Kildare, Meath and other areas, namely, the DART+ expansion. Money will be allocated to pay for new electric carriages, which will help the DART to expand into counties around Dublin. Apart from the green agenda, this will make it easier for people to access transport when they return to work. Likewise, there is a commitment to review the capital plan in the first quarter of 2021. That will give projects like my own Navan railway an opportunity to be considered with a view to seeing where they fit into the Government's plans and to have money allocated to them. We will have a thriving economy again, but we must invest in infrastructure in every county now to ensure that.

I chaired the retail forum, which spent the past couple of months not just engaging with Members of the Houses on ideas around business and so on, but with the national representative bodies of businesses, in particular retailers. We got some great ideas from them and our local businesses in Meath and Westmeath. They fed into initiatives in the budget to try to protect retail and other business sectors. The main message has to do with online retail. I welcome that more than €10 million has been allocated - €5 million in our Department's budget and €5 million in the recovery fund - to fund the successful online retail scheme, which is run by Enterprise Ireland. That scheme and the online trading voucher scheme try to encourage retailers not only to have a physical presence on the street when they are allowed to be open, but also to develop online offerings and services. There is considerable potential and opportunity for the Irish retail sector to win back not only some of the market share that it has lost to online retail companies from outside the country, but also some customers from abroad. That is what we are trying to do.

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