Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE) | Oireachtas source

There is no mechanism whatsoever to stop the electricity companies pocketing the credits by increasing their prices. There are no windfall taxes. The Government will wait for the European Commission to do that. There is no new energy infrastructure, no investment or no guarantee in controlling our supplies and prices into the future.

It is the exact same thing with the renter's credit, which is a seven-day credit for those who get it. It excludes huge numbers of renters, for instance, everybody who is in receipt of the housing assistance payment, HAP, despite the fact they are making top-ups, all students, all low-pay workers who do not earn enough to benefit from it and those whose tenancy is not even registered with the Residential Tenancies Board, RTB. Even for those who benefit, however, without proper rent controls that bring rents down to an affordable level, it just ends up in the pockets of the big corporate landlords. It just goes into the pile of money - billions of euro per year - for HAP, the rental accommodation scheme, RAS, and the other schemes from which the big corporate landlords benefit. The same applies to the help-to-buy scheme. In reality, it has from its inception been a help-to-profit scheme for developers. The money just passes through people's hands before ending up in the pockets of the developers.

There is much talk these days about trickle-down economics because of what is happening in the UK. The Irish Government operates a kind of perverse version of that - a sort of flood-up economics - where the money is temporarily transferred to ordinary people who are left with no choice but to hand that money back over to big corporations, which have no restrictions whatsoever on their profiteering. This is the significant indirect corporate welfare contained in this budget. On top of that is the direct corporate welfare of the temporary business energy support scheme of €1.25 billion.

We support assistance going to small businesses but it has to be done on the basis of proven need and with conditions in terms of quality employment for the workers. Instead, we have a massive giveaway to almost every business in the State. The very biggest corporations in this country are going to be able to benefit from this scheme to the tune of €10,000 of public money for every month the scheme operates. Even more scandalously, and I am open to and would like to be corrected here, there appear to be no mechanisms to stop the data centres benefiting from this scheme. Is it accurate that we are going to be giving €10,000 to each of these data centres per month to subsidise their energy when they are contributing to an absolute crisis of energy in this country? If that is the case, that is absolutely scandalous. Of course, the special assignee relief programme, SARP, continues for the super-high-income people and the knowledge development box continues the corporate tax haven.

Contrast the billions for big businesses with the pennies for pensioners, carers and unemployed people. They needed €27 per week just to keep their incomes steady in real terms. Instead, they got €12. To add insult to injury, they got €2 per week extra for a qualified child. That is €2 to feed and clothe a child in the context of the soaring crisis. It is absolutely scandalous.

The sting in the tail of these increases is that because of the Government's failure to raise the income levels for social housing or even better, make social housing universal, people will be kicked off the housing list as a consequence. They will lose their access to HAP because the Government will not deal with the issue of social housing. It is a huge issue that the Government should address.

Then, last night, the Government rammed through a vote to put €5 billion in the rainy day fund.

It is three years since the then Government declared a national climate emergency and four years since it declared a national emergency in respect of housing. It is pouring now; we are in an emergency situation. Instead of putting this money away to bail out banks in the future, we should be investing in public housing, expanded public transport, insulation, retrofitting and green energy.

I also want to raise a point about IVF. Many couples will have had their hopes raised by a leak to the effect that IVF was going to be offered in the public system by 2023. When you look at the small print, however, it seems that was a cruel and inaccurate leak. The Minister for Public and Expenditure and Reform spoke about providing supports for the first time in respect of to IVF treatment. When you read the budget book, not one cent is allocated in respect of the provision of IVF treatment. The Irish Independentreports, "the first phase of public funding for IVF treatment will not begin until late next year, on a limited basis at first, and details have yet to be worked on how it will be assessed". It will be very cruel if the Government does not act now to have IVF available within the public system because couples cannot delay on this matter. They cannot afford to wait for the Government to get its nice headlines year after year without it making available within the public health system the funding and resources necessary to provide IVF to everybody who needs it.

Yesterday, the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage brought a memorandum to Cabinet about the issue of defective apartments. He announced - with a big drum roll - the establishment of a group to look into the report of another group. We do not need multiple months of waiting to have another report about a first report. We know what the issue is - defective building as a result of inadequate regulation under Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, and a regime of self-certification. We know what the answer is - 100% redress, with the State pursuing the builders responsible. This should have been included in the budget yesterday. We have provided for it in our alternative budget. The Government should move immediately and not draw the matter out.

What is the alternative to all of this? If you start from a position that does not seek to maximise profit for corporations but, instead, that comes at matters from the eco-socialist perspective of people's needs, including the need for all of us to live on a habitable planet, you end up with a different approach to the budget and a different way of organising our economy and society. You would stop the energy rip-off by renationalising the energy sector, imposing price controls and running it under democratic public ownership on a not-for-profit basis. You would invest public money instead of handing it over to developers and corporate landlords, and you would invest public money to build quality public housing. You would buy up the HAP and RAS landlords' properties and nationalise the big corporate landlords. You would take everybody in this country out of poverty. It can be done. Instead of cutting the budget for climate, which this budget is doing, there would be massive public investment in renewable energy, including public ownership and public investment in free, green and frequent public transport. There would be public investment in retrofitting and insulation. Inflation would be cut in the simplest way possible; by removing things from the market and from decommodifying things by providing vital public services as that. Universal basic public services would be provided, including free childcare, free GP care and genuinely free education at all levels.

The money is there to do it. In our alternative budget, we set out just four measures, including in respect of employer's PRSI, another rate of tax for those earning over €100,000, a wealth tax and increasing corporation tax, which would raise €11 billion, with the corporation tax coming on top of that. The Government refused to do it. The third-richest country in the world has social crises all over the place because the Government runs society and the economy in the interests of the corporate landlords, energy companies and developers. That is why we need a change of Government. More than that, we need system change. We need to organise society on an eco-socialist basis in the interests of people, not profit.

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