Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

While there are positive measures in the budget, they are all once-off in nature. It fails to take into account the background in which this budget is being passed. This is my seventh budget since I was elected in 2016. Since then we have declared a climate emergency and a biodiversity emergency. We have a serious and volatile geopolitical situation. We have had a Covid pandemic, and the message from that was we simply could not proceed with business as it was. We had to have a new model. We had to have transformative action. Unfortunately, I have seen no sign of transformative action. This budget - I will have to check the minutiae of it, which will take time - has put an emphasis on once-off payments that would be welcome, in a sense, if they were within a package of transformation, which they are not. It is a budget to curry votes and is completely out of touch with the feedback in every single election since I started standing as a candidate. All of the time, the appeal to us was for straight talking, honesty and public services in return for tax. Yet, the Government through Fine Gael puts constant emphasis on tax reduction or tax expenditure. We would all welcome that, except that it is at the expense of services.

We are dealing with this budget having looked at the previous one. Social Justice Ireland does a great analysis, before and after. It tells us, as have many Deputies, that the gap between the rich and the poor is worsening. The CSO data show that in 2022 the richest 20% of people had four times the income of the poorest 20%. According EUROSTAT, Ireland is now the most expensive country in the EU, with prices 46% higher than the EU average.

Child poverty has been mentioned by the Ministers, Deputies Donohoe and Michael McGrath. I cannot let pass the cynical use of language by the Minister for Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Expenditure. He stated: "This is a Budget that makes concrete progress in ensuring Ireland is one of the best places in the world to be a child." He proceeds to talk about an additional one-off payment. There is absolutely nothing for long term. He repeated that what is being done in the budget is to ensure "Ireland is one of the best places on earth in which to be a child". That is a cynical misuse of language when you look at the figures for poverty in Ireland. The CSO survey on living conditions stated that 13.1% of people in this very rich country were at risk of poverty. That was up by 11% from 2021. Seven in ten persons experiencing consistent poverty are living in rented or rent-free accommodation. Some 7.5% of our children were living in consistent poverty in 2022. That is again an increase on 2021. There are 671,000 people living in poverty, of whom 188,602 are children. The statistics go on and on, and yet we talk about making this the best little country for a child to be reared in.

An OECD report was brought to my attention by a Fintan O'Toole article in The Irish Timesa few weeks ago. I thank him for that. The report states that the average cost to the economy of childhood socioeconomic disadvantage is approximately 3.4% of GDP. That amounts to €20 billion. In other words, the cost of poverty is €20 billion. Let us take in the cost of domestic violence. At a conservative estimate it is €2.7 billion per year, which I have repeated over and over. We could go on about the failure to deal with our mental health crisis and so on. On every level, this country is failing to acknowledge the problems that cost physically, mentally, emotionally and psychologically. It is also failing to do so on a fiscal basis.

It is costing the economy, year after year, billions because we are failing to deal with it.

I am bamboozled by the figures I am being given for housing. I always try to go back to simplicity when I am bamboozled by what I have read. I look at Galway and at the Department’s figures. From 2009, not a single public house was constructed in Galway. We will take it from 2016 forward from the Department’s figures: 2016, zero houses in Galway City Council; 2017, zero; 2018, 14. This is in a city that has had a housing crisis for a very long time. In 2019, the figure was 29. In 2020, the year of Covid, we really excelled and built 99 houses. We went backwards in 2021 and built 74. In the first three quarters of 2022, we built nothing; by the end, we had built 26. I mention that because we have a huge waiting list. The number of households with children living in appalling accommodation waiting for public housing is unbelievable.

Deputies are used to these figures being thrown out, but let me try and break it down again. Simon Communities of Ireland constantly does a quarterly report that spells out the position in plain English. Galway city has not a single house that can be rented within the discretionary rates. Yet if we take HAP, RAS, long-term leasing and the other schemes, over €1 billion is going directly into the private market. I do not mean to belittle landlords. We need landlords, but it is an obscenity we are putting, through those schemes, over €1 billion into the housing market and not one house is available in Galway. Then in the budget, the Government brings in favourable tax relief for landlords, does a tiny bit for the renters and utterly fails to grasp that house prices and rents have to come down. That will be done only by a massive programme of public building on public land. In Galway, that is not happening. We have a Land Development Agency, another layer of bureaucracy and administration, working with the company in the docklands to provide premium housing on public land - not council or public housing, but premium housing.

I have failed to mention health. I hope to come back to the minutiae of this tomorrow. Both Ministers gave excellent delivery of their speeches but whoever is writing them might take out the part about this being a very good country to live in, particularly if you are a child or have a disability.

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