Seán Canney (Galway East, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to speak on the Finance Bill 2022 and to address some of the queries that have been raised since the budget was announced. The energy supports for households are to be welcomed, but the problem is that there are anomalies in the whole process, and pay-as-you-go customers are not sure how they are going to get the credits or how it is going to work. That must be clarified, as a matter of urgency, in order to ensure that it is clear how people who need the support most can get it. I understand that the changes to the fuel allowance are going to come into effect on 1 January. The problem is that the application process will not begin until after that. There will be people in February, March and April completing their applications for the fuel allowance, and payments will be backdated to January. People are under financial strain and do not need to be waiting for backdated payments.

Another issue that I want to raise concerns students and part-time students who do not qualify for the €1,000 reduction in their fees. It is a mistake to do that. These are young people who have been working or continue to work, are trying to improve their lives, and are paying a lot of money to be educated. We should recognise that they are doing something that is right and correct, and we should encourage them by including them in the scheme for the rebate for students.

On benefit-in-kind, there is a false impression that when a person has a company car or vehicle, he or she is on the gravy train. When I worked in private industry and had a company car, it was a necessity. It was my office. I had my files and everything else in it to allow me to deal with my day-to-day work. I was in different parts of the country, whether Dublin, Galway or wherever, and I needed the car. The problem now is that the Government is trying to differentiate between those with electric cars and those with fossil fuel cars. The Minister of State knows, as he heard last Saturday, that we do not have the infrastructure in this country to support electric cars, particularly in the regions and the west of Ireland. Why are we trying to penalise people who have petrol or diesel cars when they cannot viably operate electric cars because they cannot be confident that they will get them charged when they need to? These are people who are tied to timeframes. It is important that we look at this matter.

Another issue that arises concerns once-off payments. I feel very strongly about the €500 payment that is being made to people with disabilities. Not everybody who has a disability will get the payment. People who were on disability payments and moved over to the old-age pension when they reached the age of 66 will not get this €500. They still have the disability, but because they changed from one category of payment to another because of their age and entitlement to old-age pension, they are going to be excluded from this particular payment. That is wrong. More importantly, the €500 should not be a once-off payment to people with disabilities; it should be the start of a process by which people with disabilities are given enough money to be able to live. Back in 2019, the Government commissioned a report from Indecon. That report pointed out that it cost between €7,800 and €12,000 for people to live with disabilities at that time. The cost of disability was that much. The €500 payment is welcome, but it should be made an annual payment that is increased year on year over the next five to six years in recognition of the fact that people with disabilities have additional costs. It is very important that we look at that. It would make a difference.

There is a lot of talk about housing. I have mentioned the issue previously. The day after the budget, I questioned the concrete block levy. Changes have been made in the sense that the levy has been reduced and the introduction of the levy will be deferred until September. The timing is wrong. It is ill-judged to be even talking about adding more to the cost of construction at this stage. What we should be doing is concentrating on schemes that we have announced that have not actually come into effect. The Croí Cónaithe fund scheme for rural houses was announced at the ploughing championships, but no local authority can deal with it yet because they do not have the paperwork or a directive from a Minister to do so. Let us get real. If we are saying that schemes are in place, let us make sure they are operating from the date on which they are announced, and that the spade work is done on them so we can actually put them into place.

In the north and western region areas there are thousands of houses that are vacant. People are coming to me who want to apply for funding to bring them back into use. All I can tell them is that they will have to wait until the ministerial direction is issued to the local authorities. I also wish to point out that the local authorities may not have the necessary resources and staff to deal with all this additional stuff that is coming into play for them. They need to be supported with additional resources to make sure that these schemes can work. It cannot be like the retrofitting scheme, which was introduced and announced with a fanfare a number of months ago. To date, 69 houses have been retrofitted out of a target of thousands. There is something fundamentally wrong when we have schemes like that. We are not going through the process of thinking these schemes out, putting a plan in place for their implementation and actually testing them to make sure that they will work. There is something amiss. Sometimes what happens is that people have a good idea and it is just put out there. The school transport programme is one such example. We must ensure that whatever we are doing is tried and tested before it is introduced.

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