Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Ceann Comhairle. At this point I am not even sure what I said but I will attempt to be focused in this manner. I rarely personalise things and if I have I am sorry. It is not in my interest to personalise anything as the issues are far too serious.

Let us look at the budget now in the language that is coming out and I listened to Deputies Bruton and Lahart and so on. Deputy Lahart talked about some aspiration in the future to gender-proof the budget. We have been talking about gender-proofing, poverty-proofing and rural-proofing budgets for as long as I am in the Dáil and that is not as long as other Deputies who were doing a very good job before me. We have Deputy Bruton talking about what this will do.

I am sitting here and I am asking if we are speaking the same language. Sometimes I am confused because I go from Irish to English but this is the English language and I am genuinely not clear as to what is being said at all. We are told that we are tackling the housing crisis but we are certainly not doing so. We are following the market once again and we continue to pay the housing assistance payment, HAP, and there is no sign of the Minister making an announcement that HAP will have to stop. Of course, it cannot stop overnight. We cannot leave tenants without help now because that is the system that was brought in by Fine Gael and, unfortunately, the Labour Party, who said that HAP was the only game in town. We see the result of it now where it has artificially boosted the market to keep prices high.

Let me be positive with the Minister for a few minutes because, in fairness, he acted quickly with his colleague, Deputy McGrath, in supporting businesses and employees on the ground during the pandemic. That was very welcome. My difficulty is that the Government has not learned from it. We continue to support businesses up until next year, which is welcome, but we have set absolutely no conditions on that money in recognition that we cannot go back to the way we were. We have all agreed that we simply cannot go back.

The pandemic arose because we did not treat nature properly and it came from an absolute abuse of nature and the model which the Government is continuing to put forward is based upon an abuse of nature. It is unsustainable to keep going. We know that now. In 2019 we declared both a climate and biodiversity emergency so we now need a transformative action. It is no good anymore to have a budget where we tinker a little bit and say that we are expanding the tax bands and that everybody will be helped. All of the Minister’s colleagues here said that people will benefit from that. That is completely untrue.

Let us look at what Social Justice Ireland has said:

Firstly, as a result of this Government’s failure to focus on low to middle income households with jobs, a couple [this has already been quoted] with one earner at €30,000 has received an additional €0.39 cents per week from these two budgets combined. Even more devastating is the outcome for a household of four, two adults and two children, one income at €30,000 who also have benefitted by only €0.39 cent...

That document and other documents published by the Department of Finance show that what the Minister is saying is not accurate. The €500 million in tax cuts which the Government gave benefited the well-off or those better-off than those on a lower income. I agree with the other speakers who say that we should not have had any tax reductions whatsoever.

Over and over, with each election, people on the doorsteps have asked us for straight talking, honesty and good services in return for their tax. A public health service and public hospitals are what people want. We saw the effects of the lack of adequate public health provision in the other sense during the pandemic. People have asked for those services, as well as an integrated public transport system.

I come from a city where one can take any sort of indicator and it will show that the Government's ideology and the budgets it has brought in, year after year, are not working. At what stage will it be happy to admit its approach is not working? The Minister should listen to the CEO of Galway Simon Community, who described the need to provide services for 464 children last year as one of the really disturbing trends highlighted in the charity's annual report. One of the key findings in the report on housing by the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission, IHREC, which we will discuss in the House tomorrow night, is that lone parents are significantly affected, with fewer than 25% reporting home ownership. The report speaks about overcrowded housing and homelessness, particularly among ethnic minority groups, as well as other groups such as migrants and people with a disability. Those are just two reports from two organisations.

In Galway city, people come into my office, and those of other Deputies, who are on the housing waiting list, some of them since as far back as 2004 and others for three to five years and more, and do not have a hope of getting a house. There has been a housing task force in existence for more than two years but, apart from letters going back and forth to the Department like a type of echo chamber, I do not know of a single report it has published. I would have thought a housing task force would analyse the problem and put it to the Minister that this is what is happening, for example, in Galway.

Various speakers referred to the Land Development Agency. It was set up on a non-statutory basis i dtús báire and the very first thing it was to do was produce an audit of all the public land throughout the country. We are still awaiting that, notwithstanding that the agency is now functioning on a statutory basis. I entirely disagree with Deputy Bruton that the LDA is the solution to the housing problem. It is looking at developing private houses on public land.

Tying into that, the Department of Finance's help-to-buy scheme is being extended. As I have pointed out in the House before, the tax strategy group has reported: "The cost of help-to-buy continues to grow and, based on its current trajectory, it could reach over €107 million in 2021." Even taking into account the significant enhancements introduced on a temporary basis in July 2020, which are still in place, this is more than four times greater than the original estimated cost of €40 million per annum. Even more damningly, that money is going to people the vast majority of whom already had the means to raise a deposit. The scheme is keeping the prices of houses artificially high. It covers financing for houses that cost €600,000 or thereabouts. How can it be denied that the scheme is bolstering the market? How can the Minister come in here today and tell us in plain English that the scheme is so good, he is going to keep it for a little longer? No analysis has been carried out of it, except for the report to which I referred, since 2018.

One of the greatest challenges we face is climate change. However, I understand where some of the rural Deputies are coming from in their criticism of Government policy in this regard. It has adopted a split-and-divide approach, which is appalling. There is an emphasis on the impact of carbon tax on poorer people, which is to be mitigated by increasing the fuel allowance, but, at the same time, a completely free pass has been given to the aviation industry and data centres. Government policy is that we need those centres and they must be allowed to go full steam ahead, with absolutely no analysis of their impact. That is feeding forward into policy on wind farms. We were told in the newspapers recently that a data centre in Dublin needs a wind farm off the west coast to supply it.

None of this makes sense and none of it is sustainable. People in communities are being bought off by the policy of the Government, which is to give a few pence here and there while taking it somewhere else. It is a divide-and-conquer approach as opposed to recognising that sustainable future development requires community involvement in every part of it and community ownership of utilities. If we are going to sell the idea of wind farms to communities, we need a policy into which communities can buy. At the moment, we have a policy that is driven by the developers behind the projects, exactly the same as with the data centres. I am not choosing the words I am using here; they are from the recent EirGrid report, which stated that the policy on data centres is completely and utterly developer-driven.

I am desperately trying to be positive and there are, of course, some positive measures in the budget because the Fine Gael Party is made up of survivors, and they have survived up to now. They give enough to get their votes but it is at great cost to the sustainability of our planet. There were many ways to increase the tax take. The change to corporation tax, which has now gone up to what it should have been all along, is good. However, the newspapers tell us today that the take from that tax far exceeds expectations and predictions. One wonders what people are doing in the Department of Finance if they cannot accurately predict what is coming down the road from corporation tax. It is a good news story, however, and those returns are from a very basic level of corporation tax. Having spent four years as a member of the Committee of Public Accounts, I know well that there are many ways to avoid paying it, particularly through the use of research and development. Good luck to those companies if they can do that, but let us be honest about the money that is coming in and what is happening.

There are 643,131 people with a disability in this country. That is the figure from Social Justice Ireland, based on the most recent census data. People with a disability are more likely to finish school at an earlier age and less likely to be in employment than those without a disability. Consequently, rates of poverty among this group are higher, with more than 41% of people with a disability living on an income below the poverty line. The Government has failed to introduce a basic, cost-of-disability payment, which the various organisations have been seeking for years. Something as basic as that has still not been done.

If we look at the number of people living in poverty, the housing crisis that has led to more than 100,000 households being on a waiting list and the issues with the health system, surely it occurs to Fine Gael, the Green Party and Fianna Fáil that there is something wrong with the ideology they are constantly throwing at us on this side of the House. I have no ideology other than to say we need an absolutely fair and just society to have a fair and just economy. The economy should always serve the people, not the other way around. We should not be fiddling with figures and we should not be here in the 21st century with no gender-proofing and no consideration of the cost of tolerating domestic violence, which, at its most basic, amounts to €2.2 billion per year. We have a mental health system that is costing us an extraordinary amount of money in its failure to deal with mental health issues. Surely, at some stage, it will dawn on the parties in government that there is something wrong with all this.

We need to look our children in the eyes and say this is wrong and we are going to change it. The world is burning. To use the Minister's words, tá an domhan trí thine agus cad a rinneamar? Bhreathnaíomar ar an tine agus theip orainn aon rud a dhéanamh. Ligeamar don mhargadh na réitigh a fháil in ainneoin go raibh a fhios againn an t-am uilig nach raibh na réitigh ag an margadh. Tá na réitigh againne mar Theachtaí Dála ag obair as lámh a chéile chun a rá nach féidir linn leanúint ar aghaidh mar seo. Tá an dualgas orainn athrú cuimsitheach, bunúsach a dhéanamh anois. Gabhaim buíochas leis an gCeann Comhairle.

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