Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I will begin by acknowledging that, as Deputy Mairéad Farrell has outlined, the statements today on the national recovery and resilience plan are taking place after the plan has been developed and submitted to the Commission. Just as the Government notified the European Council on 12 May that it had approved the own-resources decision which allowed the Commission to borrow on the financial markets – which is a huge decision in anybody’s book - without any consultation or engagement with this Dáil or any of its committees, so it has already submitted a plan to the Commission which involves the drawing down and spending of €915 million. It has done this without any engagement whatsoever with the Dáil or any of its committees despite the fact that the funds drawn down through this facility are greater than the annual allocations for many Government Departments. As the Parliamentary Budget Office has noted, the Irish Government had the least engagement with its parliament in advance of submitting a plan to the Commission. In the words of this office:

...the Government has not submitted a draft or completed Recovery and Resilience Plan to the Houses of the Oireachtas. There has been no substantive engagement with the Oireachtas or Oireachtas Committees on the plan. There has been limited scrutiny by the Oireachtas in the preparation of the Recovery and Resilience Plan.

Such concerns were raised by the finance committee, but to no avail. This reflects the growing level of contempt for the Dáil on the part of the Government. On a weekly basis, the Government stymies and blocks good legislation that is brought forward by the Opposition for no reason other than that it is from the Opposition. That is not how the Dáil should operate. Now that Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are in government they are keen to avoid scrutiny as much as possible.

This is a debate after the fact and after the submission, but it gives us an opportunity to discuss not only the details of the Government's national recovery and resilience plan, but the wider economic recovery plan published yesterday. As part of the national recovery and resilience plan Ireland is to receive an allocation of €915 million from the EU's €750 billion recovery fund in response to the pandemic. The Government's plan, which was provided in the national economic plan published yesterday, outlines 16 investments and nine areas for reform under three priorities: advancing green transition; accelerating and expanding digital reforms and transformations; and social and economic recovery and job creation. To advance the green transition, the Government has outlined seven investments, with a total of €503 million and 55% of the total allocation under the facility. I do not propose to touch on all of the investments and reforms, but in the time available to me, I will focus on two of them.

The first is the proposal for a residential retrofit loan scheme through the use of loan guarantees. The success of this scheme will be borne out by its accessibility and its affordability. The test will be whether it can be availed of by households across the income spectrums or, like many of the measures emanating from the Green Party, it will be reserved for those with the greatest means. The average cost of retrofitting a house is between €50,000 and €80,000. The Minister is hoping that participating lenders will offer loans at 3.5%. It is difficult to see how such a scheme will be widely accessible, but we await further details from Government in that regard. I ask the Minister to outline how this retrofitting programme will compete with the limited resources and workers that are available to the housing sector and the major social crisis that has developed because of the failed Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael polices for much of a decade. What is the Government's plan to ensure that the resources needed for home building will not be diverted towards retrofitting? These are questions that need to be answered to assess the credibility of the Government's plans in this regard. Another reform under this priority is to broaden and increase the carbon tax, a tax that is known to be regressive and impacts low income and rural houses the hardest. The Government has given no guarantee that social welfare rates and cash payments will be increased annually to offset the impact of this additional tax burden.

With regard to digital reforms and transformations, I welcome many of the commitments that are being made. A focus must be placed on the IT and data infrastructure of the health service, which has been neglected for far too long with disastrous consequences for staff and patients. More broadly, Ireland's allocation is small in comparison with other EU member states. This is due, in part, to our inflated GDP figures, which fail to reflect the real measurement of our economy. The Government must engage with the Commission to ensure this never happens again. We cannot have our citizens short changed owing to economic distortions and measures that do not reflect any reality on the ground. We await the full details of the plan and how investments outlined therein will be implemented. As always, delivery, not the promises made on pieces of paper, will be key.

I want now to turn to the national economic plan. It is clear that Sinn Féin has won many of the economic arguments with the recognition by the Government this late in the day that the State can act and intervene in our economy to provide and protect better outcomes for workers and families. With that in mind, there are a number of measures in the plan that Sinn Féin welcomes. We welcome the continued and targeted supports for highly impacted sectors, for which Sinn Féin argued, including: the extension of the debt warehousing to the end of 2021, with repayments deferred until 2023; the extension of the employment wage subsidy scheme in its current form until September and beyond; and the reduced rate of VAT for the hospitality and tourism sectors, which will remain at the lower rate until September 2022. However, there are serious weaknesses in this plan which will be of huge concern and anxiety to workers across the State. The Government has chosen to pull the rug from under the feet of the tens of thousands or, perhaps, hundreds of thousands of workers by way of its announcement that it will cut the pandemic unemployment payment in September and will continue to cut it in phases over the months that follow. This is not the first time this has happened. The Government, inclusive of the Minister, Deputy Michael McGrath and his colleague, the Tánaiste, Deputy Varadkar, tried to cut the pandemic unemployment payment from €350 to €300 last September, but Sinn Féin forced it to reverse that decision. The Government then came up with a plan to cut it in January and again in February and March with a view to ending it on 1 April. Sinn Féin, again, forced the Government to reverse that decision because it was the wrong thing to do then. It is also the wrong thing to do now. The Government is abandoning these workers. So much for we are all in it together. As long as restrictions remain and these individuals cannot go back to work because of the restrictions, the supports need to be in place.

We do not know how successful the reopening will be in getting people back to work. The Government has gone against its previous decision and opted to be driven by arbitrary dates, not data or evidence. The Government and the Central Bank have said previously that the hundreds of thousands of workers who lost their jobs due to the pandemic will remain out of work after the summer and into next year. The Government, blind to the challenges and suffering families will endure, proposes to go ahead and cut their supports from under them. It needs to reverse this decision and to do so immediately. It has instilled fear in families and workers, many of whom will not be able to go back to work.

There are other glaring gaps in the plan. For example, the Government has decided to recommit to the failed housing policy instead of doubling capital investment in public housing, which was called for by Sinn Féin and the ESRI, despite a housing crisis being a real and present danger to our economy and its people. It also fails children, with no measures in regard to the one of the greatest barriers to women participating in employment and the workforce. The Minister, Deputy Michael McGrath, is a signatory to the statutory instrument in regard to the mica address scheme. I ask him to understand the plight of thousands of homeowners across Donegal for whom that scheme is no longer working and to commit to 100% redress for the 6,000 homes across Donegal and Mayo that, in many cases, are no longer habitable as a result of the mica scandal.

See this speech in context