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

What sums up this budget are permanent tax breaks for the rich and once-off crumbs for ordinary people. Many people will not have heard the term "angel investor" before today. However, angel investors will wake up tomorrow and discover there is a new tax break. If you are an angel investor, it is a great budget because there is a new tax break worth almost €500,000. It is a great budget. For the landlords who get a new tax break, it is a great budget. For the tax-avoiding big corporations, it is a great budget. However, for ordinary people who get inadequate, once-off measures, this is a very poor budget.

It used to be there was one once-off measure, which was the annual Christmas bonus, in terms of social protection payments. That was it. Now we have a range of payments, which means the core rates of payment are slipping, bringing people further and further into poverty. The Government is papering over the deepening deprivation of ordinary people who are reliant on a fixed income, be they pensioners, people with disabilities or unemployed people. The problem is poverty, deprivation, inequality and the housing and health crises are not once-off. None of those things goes away; all are permanent unless we have a government that addresses them.

The measure that sums up the budget best is the treatment of landlords versus that of renters. A landlord gets a tax break for next year worth €600; the following year it is €800; and the year after that and onwards, it is €1,000. Compare that with what a renter gets in this budget: €250. The landlord gets almost three times as much as the renter and much of what the renter gets will, in fact, end up in the pocket of the landlord. The justification for this from the Minister in a context when we have record rents, that is, money going into the pockets of landlords, is that for every tenant there has to be a landlord. It is complete nonsense. Why can the State not be the landlord of any tenant currently in a home where the landlord says they want to get out of the market? Fine, let them get out of the market. The State should buy at market rate. The tenant gets secure tenure, the State gets an asset and the landlord gets to leave. The idea we have to incentivise landlords to stay in the market is like saying we should give a tax break to ticket touts to encourage the live music industry. Landlords do not provide housing; they simply rent existing housing. If they leave the market, it is not a problem as long as the State steps in to buy it and ensure people remain in situ. The reason the Government is doing this is that it is a landlord's Government. It is made up of landlords and represents the interests of landlords.

The other striking contrast concerns angel investors. There is €500,000 for angel investors. These are high net wealth individuals - multimillionaires who invest - and the Government has made up a special tax break for them costing the public €55 million. Compare that with how children are being treated. One of the most shameful aspects of the budget is the disgraceful treatment of children. For someone on a social welfare payment who has a child, the Government is increasing the payment by €4 per week. I am getting the beginnings of a sense of how expensive it is to have a child but only the very beginnings because I understand it becomes much more expensive as the child gets older and you have to buy clothes, pay for education and everything else. Four euro per week in a cost-of-living crisis is scandalous. It is even worse in terms of domiciliary care allowance, where there is an extra €10 per month, or €2.50 per week, in a cost-of-living crisis. It is only a couple of months since the Taoiseach launched a plan to end child poverty. It was very ambitious, but this is much more in line with the old Leo Varadkar who said Tiny Tim should get a job. It appears it is now Government policy that the only way these children can pay for themselves is if they go out and get a job.

In education, is it the same policy that informs the idea of extending the schoolbooks scheme, but only up to third year, and suggests that the leaving certificate is some sort of luxury for people? We know of the crisis in recruitment and retention of teachers. That crisis will get worse and there is nothing here to address it: no increase in pay for teachers or accommodation for teachers or other key workers. A paltry sum of €7 million for extra capitation will go nowhere to getting rid of the supposedly voluntary school charges. There is no increase, despite promises, for postgraduate workers. Deputy Boyd Barrett made the point about the stark contrast between a one-income family earning €25,000 getting €52 per year in the tax changes, or €1 per week, and a two-income family on €175,000, who get €992 per year, almost €1,000.

I draw attention to the complete failure of the budget on the question of climate action and the biodiversity crisis. There is a peculiar line. The Government abolished one rainy day fund and set up two rainy day funds to replace it. It calls one of them the infrastructure, climate and nature fund. It will reach €14 billion, on which only €3 billion is actually anything to do with climate and nature. It is just a word. The Minister, Deputy McGrath, said the aim of the €3 billion “is to help the achievement of carbon budgets through capital projects where it is clear our climate targets are not being reached”. That reads like a blatant admission we will not reach our targets. We have not reached any of our targets up to now and are on a trajectory to wildly miss them. It raises the question of what that money will be used for. Will it be used to buy carbon credits or pay fines? Is that the purpose of putting this money away?

It makes no sense to say what we will do in terms of climate action is put money away in a fund that will be invested in something. We are in ecological crisis now. Look around the world. Look at what has happened in Greece: flooding one month, after horrendous wildfires the previous month. The devastation across our planet is happening right now. It makes sense to invest money now to address the climate catastrophe, as opposed to putting it away for some day in the future. This crisis is happening now.

Instead, the Government has provided €29 million extra - that is all - for expanding public transport. There is no indication the supposed 2:1 ratio of investment in public transport versus investment in roads is being kept. It looks like it is a 50:50 ratio in the budget documents. What is needed is not rocket science but is something we have shouted for for a long time. It is contained in our budget documents. It is investment in free, frequent expanded public transport; State investment in renewable energy, as opposed to waiting for the private sector to do it; retrofitting people’s homes massively through a State construction company by installing solar panels and proper insulation; and funding small farmers and guaranteeing them a decent income for a just transition.

The Government made a promise that, in this budget, it would reduce the cost of childcare by 25%. It will claim it is keeping that promise but that is a joke. It says it will do it in September 2024. It was a new innovation when a Government a few years back decided to announce measures in the budget that would not be introduced in January but instead would come in in April and so would be at lower cost. To stretch that all the way out to September, which is almost a year from now, and claim it is done in this budget is really a joke. There is €10 million in extra core funding for childcare. That is all, when the pay claim of childcare workers, an underpaid and crucial group of workers, would cost €142 million. The Government is saying to workers they will continue to work on poverty wages and to parents that they will continue to effectively pay a second mortgage for childcare. In our budget document, we propose and budget for free childcare from next year and outline a road to a proper national childcare service provided free at the point of use at no extra cost to ordinary people, paid for through progressive taxation.

A question arises. In one of the richest countries in the world on a GDP per capitabasis, how, while running a massive surplus, can the Government produce a budget that fails the vast majority of people in the country so dramatically and blatantly?

The answer is that it is because the Government's budget and its policy are based on the idea that the capitalist market is going to provide the solutions for the problems people face. We shall incentivise angel investors to come and invest to create solutions for the climate crisis, or whatever they are going to invest in. We are going to give tax breaks to landlords to enter the market or continue in the market to resolve the housing crisis. We are going to give further tax breaks to multinational corporations that already pay very little in the way of tax in order to keep them here. The Government sees the market as being the solution to the problems we have in our society. That is the root cause of the problem and it is rooted in the fact that, fundamentally, the Government represents those interests.

The problem is that the capitalist market is not the solution; the capitalist market is the problem. The capitalist market is responsible for the housing crisis. The capitalist market is responsible for the ecological disaster we have across our planet. The capitalist market is responsible for the cost-of-living crisis. We know from multiple studies that on a global basis, an EU basis and an Irish basis, two thirds of the reason we have inflation now and two thirds of the price increases are caused by profiteering. What we have is greedflation, so to speak, not inflation. The Government refuses to address any of that because it thinks the market is the solution and because it represents those who are engaged in the profiteering, be they the big oil and gas corporations, the big food supermarkets, the big agribusiness corporations and so on, all of them making massive profits.

We have to point out the reality that, as Deputy Boyd Barrett noted, corporate profits have soared in this country. People would not believe it but they have quadrupled in the course of the past ten years. It is not just corporate profits that have soared. The personal wealth of the richest people in this country has also soared, so for the millionaires in this country, who make up the top 5% of the population, their collective wealth is now €388 billion. We have to say that now is not the time to shelve the proposal for a wealth tax, as Sinn Féin has done. Now is the time to say that the wealth and resources, which are massive in our society, should be taken into the control and into the hands of ordinary people and used to address all of the social crises we have. We do not need a government that manages this capitalist system. We need a left government that implements an eco-socialist budget that transforms things in the interests of ordinary people.

Things do not have to be this way. We do not have to have one in ten families reliant on food banks to get by. We do not have to have a health crisis. We do not have to have a housing crisis. We have enough resources in this country to have a decent life and decent public services for everybody, but what that requires is a mass movement to end the rule of the rich, the tax-avoiding multinational corporations, the big landlords and the big polluting industries, and have a left government that actually serves the interests of ordinary people and implements an eco-socialist budget.

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