Dáil debates

Tuesday, 12 October 2021

Financial Resolutions 2021 - Budget Statement 2022

 

6:05 pm

Photo of Verona MurphyVerona Murphy (Wexford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

This is the second budget I have addressed as a Member of the House. Last year, I focused on a number of crises that had developed over the course of the previous years. I mentioned the problems in housing, tourism, hospitality, physical health provision, mental healthcare, transport and agriculture. Unfortunately, in the 12 months that followed, very few of these issues have seen any progress. The policies of spending unprecedented billions, much of it in a wasteful manner, while at the same time putting the brakes on our economic activity have resulted in soaring levels of debt and soaring bills for the future generations that will have to pay the price, which will be in the region of €50,000, as I understand it, for every person.

There are many measures in the budget today that sound like they should be welcomed. However, when the reality is explained, they sound very different. Taking the extra €1 billion announced for the health budget, there is currently an underspend in the health service and treatment for every imaginable illness has a waiting list in some regard. If there were a proper management structure that ensured accountability for the wastage of public moneys, we might see changes. Witnesses from the HSE recently appeared before the Committee of Public Accounts, of which I am a member, after which I received a lot of correspondence from fairly high-level HSE employees. The following is a flavour of what they had to say about spending in the HSE:

I saw your questioning of the CEO of the HSE. Every consultant in Ireland knows the ventilators ordered during Covid are junk but they cannot say it because they work for the HSE. No western country uses them.

The questions that must be asked are:

(1) Who exactly ordered them?

(2) Was any consultant anaesthesiologist or critical care doctor consulted?

(3) What does a civil servant know about ventilators? If an Air Corps plane needed an engine, would a civil servant order it without talking to a pilot or aerospace engineer? Ventilators, like aircraft, are made by a certain few reputable, well-recognised companies with outstanding track records and credentials.

(4) Who decided we needed 2,000 ventilators? We do not have 2,000 critical care beds, let alone nurses, technicians or doctors trained to use them. It is like a civil servant buying 2,000 helicopters for air-sea rescue and then being asked where are the pilots, the ground crew and the technicians to run them.

It is just farcical. Saying it was done in a hurry is a complete cop-out. It could have been sorted with a couple of phone calls but, like everything in the HSE, there is no accountability. What was not asked at the Committee of Public Accounts was about the PCR equipment bought in a certain country that does not work, and there is no end to this type of waste.

When a Minister announces €1 billion extra in funding, we must have confidence it will be well spent, with a return on investment and giving value for money to the taxpayer who provided the money in the first place, and not go down a black hole of spending, with no accountability.

I refer to the announcement of free GP care for those aged under eight at a time when there is a chronic shortage of GPs and no locum cover. Some 700 GPs are due to retire this year but there are only 295 in training. That is a significant deficit that even the Minister for Finance should be able to calculate. The truth is this announcement is spin and nothing more. False hope.

The announcement that the Government will increase home care support hours is more spin. The hours are available but, due to chronic staff shortages, 540 families in Wexford alone have been granted the home care support package but are waiting for a carer to deliver it. There are no carers available. It would be far more beneficial to have a plan to reduce waiting lists and ensure hospital capacity will be permanently expanded, including the provision of 340 ICU beds to care for the most vulnerable. How will the gaps in the numbers of GPs and other medical staff be filled? We need a plan with clear objectives and accountability that can be measured as a success or a failure within a couple of years.

I believe €6 billion is to be the spend on housing. Housing supply has been in crisis for the past nine years and it is still in crisis. A major contributor to that crisis in rural Ireland is the crazy minimum density issue that has been well aired by me on the floor of this House but decidedly ignored by the powers that be. They continue to whisper in the ears of county managers, who are encouraged to keep command of councillors and ensure that high densities are passed and catered for in the county development plan, no matter what. As the saying goes, that will be the rock they perish on.

To return to the subject of waste, An Bord Pleanála is currently implementing policies that do not exist. The strategic housing development, SHD, process has yielded no houses, but it has yielded legal bills of in the region of €20 million as a result of the failure to recognise that the planning policy it is implementing is illegal. It is clear that this is another area of unnecessary waste. I have only addressed two instances of waste. There are probably 1,002 areas where moneys are being wasted and there is no accountability. This has to change.

I am disappointed that the help-to-buy scheme was not extended to include the purchase of existing second hand homes. These incentive schemes are useless to buyers unless the supply of housing is adequate. There is some availability of derelict or second-hand homes on the market and these might be the only affordable option for many first-time buyers, so I hope an extension of the scheme will be given serious consideration in the review announced by the Minister today. I hope the review is intended to enhance the scheme and not to do away with it.

The budget included a rise in carbon tax. Carbon tax will disproportionately affect dwellers in regional and rural Ireland. They have no public transport alternatives. There is no alternative to fossil fuel in the countryside or in cities. No significant effort has been made to ameliorate the poverty this will impose on so many and no account has been taken of the increase of approximately 30 cent in the cost of a litre of fuel in recent months. Carbon taxes are effectively an attack on the poorest in society in order to make many politicians feel better about themselves.

The people who will need help heating their homes are the marginalised and the low income earners. The €5 given to pensioners does not cover that and neither does the €5 social welfare increase. Age Action has stated that the buying power of the pension has reduced by €10.50 in the past three years. That leaves a deficit of €5, not an increase. The Government may need reminding that only 30% of pensioners receive the fuel allowance and only 50% receive the living alone allowance. That leaves 50% of the aged population with an increase of €5, rather than the increase of €13.50 referred to today. I hope that provision will be made to alleviate fuel poverty if the weather is very poor this winter. I suppose the Government's crazy climate policies are having some positive effects. For example, peat producers in Latvia are absolutely delighted with the behaviour of the Government. You would have to laugh if it were not so serious.

There are a variety of other issues that I have consistently raised in my 18 months in the House. I expect to see action as a result of the budget. There is no denying that County Wexford, in spite of being the largest county in Leinster in terms of area and in the south east in terms of population, has been neglected.

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