Gerald Nash (Louth, Labour) | Oireachtas source

We need to move more quickly to a real living wage, not the rebranded, watered-down version Government has in mind.

In its costed alternative budget, Labour has ring-fenced €1.3 billion for a new public service pay agreement. The talks have yet to commence, but this would allow for a cumulative increase of in the region of 5% next year for nurses, healthcare assistants, teachers, SNAs, gardaí, council workers and civil servants.

Looking at the documents, there does not seem to be any Government allocation for Government sector pay rises at all. Where is that allocation? We need to know. Sinn Féin's allocation in its alternative budget should make public servants who require a pay increase next year equally concerned. When we take inflation into account, public sector pay is at 2012 levels and in recent years the rate of pay increases are well below the rates of increase in the private sector.

The Minister for Justice has yet again shown that she has no deftness of touch when it comes to An Garda Síochána. I want to focus on Garda pay. At a time when a record 114 gardaí have hung up their boots already this year, when communities are in crisis, when they are demanding community policing and they are made to feel more secure in their homes and communities, the Government has stuck a few euro on the training allowance. That is a Hail Mary pass if ever I saw one - hoping everything will work out well. How was this figure worked out? Nobody seems to know. It was plucked from the air; it just does not make sense. It is up to €305 from €184, which is less than less than the current rate of the national minimum wage. That is what we are expecting new Garda recruits to exist on. That is an insult to a new recruit.

The Taoiseach has admitted new recruits are often older than former intakes and are leaving jobs - good jobs in some cases - to join the Garda. Some will have families and financial commitments and his public comments admit that. At this rate, they will not be queuing up to join or stay in training in Templemore. They will not be able to complete their training at all. Something much more radical needs to be done. For a small €15 million a year, as proposed by the Labour Party, 900 new recruits could be put on the starting salary for a garda of €35,000 across their training period. If the Minister is serious about making An Garda Síochána an attractive proposition for the right kind of recruit, this is what she needs to do, and she needs to do it now.

We get a real sense of this Government’s priorities when we look at the social protection package. It is incredible that the tax cut and the 2024 welfare package are more or less the same size. However, on digging a little deeper, they are not. The tax package amounts to €1.3 billion in tax cuts while the social welfare package is €1.1 billion; go figure. This is at a time when people are finding it exceptionally difficult to make ends and we know who those most impacted by the inflation and cost-of-living crisis are.

A quick analysis shows that a single person on €75,000 who owns their own home, is up over €2,000 already, thanks to the mortgage interest tax relief along with income tax and USC changes. For pensioners in a local authority house who cannot keep themselves warm, it is about €700 or €800. Who needs a break more? This budget clearly shows the Government has picked a side and is sticking to it. When welfare rates need to be increased by €27.50 a week, it gave €12. This is not a figure the Labour Party has plucked out of the air. When are we going to look at our welfare system through the lens of income adequacy, the well-established benchmark of the minimum essential standard of living?

Society has a settled view that core welfare payments must be set at 34% of average income. Fianna Fáil believed the same in 2007. A lot has changed since then and the Government has moved away from that principle. This year’s budget leaves those who are on small fixed incomes still gasping for air. That is why the Labour Party is clear. We need to grow up and mature. We need to decide as a society to index our social welfare and personal tax systems. It would be the mark of a mature democracy if this were just done automatically and routinely every year rather than using the summer months filling the newspapers with speculation and spin ahead of the budget being finalised, playing with people's lives. That would be a game changer.

The Minister for Social Protection knows only too well that there is an extra cost involved in living with a disability. We need a new cost of disability payment, as the Labour Party has called for, starting at €20 a week in this budget. That is the kind of reform we need for people with disabilities who need help to live with dignity, not the Tory-inspired racket the Government looked set to propose a few weeks ago.

I am pleased to see that the process of pay-related benefits seems to have commenced, at last. We do not have the detail. The Labour Party has gone some way to proposing an initiation of that process in our costed alternative budget. However, the Minister's long-awaited initiative has come far too late for the people I represent who used to work in Tara Mines. I heard the Minister speak of the fate of the workers in Tara Mines on the radio on Sunday.

We believe the Tara Mines job losses could have been avoided in their entirety if Government took the Labour Party’s long-standing advice to establish a German-style short-time work scheme with seed funding of €400 million. We would not be talking now about people who are out of work. We would be talking about supporting people who are in work and with training and skills development when they are furloughed. I note the Government has indicated it is starting to make adjustments to the PRSI base on a cumulative basis over the next period of time. There is a 0.1% increase in PRSI across the board when what is ultimately needed, given that employer's PRSI is well behind the EU norm, are more significant increases to bring the levels of employer's PRSI up to the EU norm.

This is the responsible thing to do for the workers of today and pensioners of the future. Setting up a dedicated wealth fund to help with ageing costs should not mean we pretend that ageing costs are covered. They are not and they could never be covered by a fund such as the Government proposes and which we support. There has never been a better time to start adjusting PRSI. Why do I say that? It is not just my hunch; it is what all the experts say. We have full employment, a red-hot economy at capacity and a precarious and unbalanced tax system. The Government needs to get a move on and stop avoiding unpopular decisions.

The Government is proposing a back-of-the-envelope scheme to help small businesses shoulder extra costs. We understand the motivation of this initiative, but it has all the hallmarks of a sop, a bribe to businesses. How it is designed and applied is crucial, but we do not have the detail. The Labour Party has no difficulty with the concept of support schemes for viable enterprises going through a difficult time. We have shown that time and again. However, in any transfer of wealth from taxpayers to enterprise, there must be social, labour and quality-job and collective bargaining conditions attached. Have we not learned any lessons from the operation of the wage subsidy scheme, for example? We also need to be conscious that, as we read in the media, it seems this money is being taken from commercial rates. Who will fill the hole left in public service provision for our local authorities? Any such scheme much be limited to firms of a certain size and legal structure.

I turn to the issue of child poverty. I must admit my heart danced a little last December when I heard the Taoiseach pledge he would tackle child poverty head on. I was delighted, but I should have been more wary. The Government shamefully has not passed its first test on child poverty. We needed a children’s budget to end child poverty. Instead, we got a budget for landlords, some homeowners and higher earners.

In 2022, nearly 200,000 children lived in households that were below the poverty line and 250,000 children were living in households experiencing deprivation. Child poverty is a national scandal which must be ended, but we know today it will not be ended by this Government. The Taoiseach would have been better off saying nothing in December. This is an insult to the poorest children and the poorest families in the country. He would have been better off keeping his mouth shut and saying nothing. He raised expectations that child poverty in this country could be eradicated and he has done nothing about it.

Labour proposed a series of measures, including making a good start by increasing the qualified child payment to €15 a week for children over 12, and to €10 a week for the under-12s. What did the Government do? It added a miserable €4 a week to the qualified child payment. That is nowhere near sufficient to give every child in the country a fair break and a decent start. While poverty is not only about money, it is always about money. Every member of Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil and the Green Party should hang their heads in collective shame today. The promise has not been delivered on. What we ultimately want to see is a movement towards the kind of programme the ESRI and Community Foundation Ireland have proposed and that is a second tier of child benefit payment for those in real need, targeted at those children who need it most to eradicate the scourge of child poverty.

Nowhere does this budget disappoint more than on childcare. It promised little and delivered less. The Minister only just managed to persuade his Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael colleagues at the 11th hour that childcare fees should come down by the promised 25%. It is an 11th hour job designed to avoid the blushes. Of course, the 25% cut of which the Minister spoke, will not come into effect until next September, that is September 2024. It is almost a year away. This means that parents of children who started creche in 2019 or 2020 will have seen only one reduction during their time in early years. The situation is stark for parents, children and skilled professionals in the sector. The picture painted by the results of a survey recently undertaken by my colleague Senator Marie Sherlock in Dublin Central is revealing. In my experience the results are accurate. Nearly half of parents are cutting back on working hours to make childcare arrangements work. In 21% of cases, one parent had to give up work. There is a severe shortage of places for babies under one year old. Services are barely affordable, if available at all. Small and agile services that have been around for a long time are closing. Any of us representing urban Ireland will recognise this picture.

When will we wake up and decide to revolutionise how we do quality early years in Ireland? The course we are on is manifestly not the right one. We need a system built on quality for children, affordability for parents and fairness for professionals. It is why the Labour Party says we need to get a start on our vision of a universal public childcare system with between 5,000 and 6,000 places at a cost of €65 million in 2024, including a cap of €200 a month in fees and an increased investment of €142 million in core funding as a glide path to fair pay for professionals. The SIPTU Big Start campaign costed this and said a minimum of €92 million was needed to improve pay and conditions by at least €2 an hour. A further €50 million would be then needed to recognise length of service and qualifications. That is what is needed to revolutionise our early years system.

This Government has been criminally ill-prepared for the crisis in care that is developing. The census laid this bare. Between 2016 and 2022 the number of people providing regular, unpaid care increased by more than 50% from just under 200,000 people in 2016 to 300,000 in 2022. What a level of growth that is. We still have too many people who care full time for a loved one whose work is not adequately recognised by the State. We could change that overnight. For a small amount of money we could make sure that at least everyone in receipt of the respite grant gets the carers allowance in recognition of his or her invaluable work. It is time for the lip service to end.

Our party leader, Deputy Ivana Bacik, was not wrong when she said housing is the civil rights issue of our time. However, this Government does not see housing as an issue of rights. For the Government, housing is a commodity. A house is something to transact, an asset to buy and sell. With the eye-catching budget intervention on housing, or tax relief for landlords and mortgage interest relief, what is left of its credibility is gone. Reintroducing mortgage interest relief is an interesting use of public money. Those who fixed their rates last year or the year before are rightly asking today, “What about me?” As far as we know about this scheme, it requires two years of mortgage interest statements to qualify. What about those on fixed mortgages? What happens next year for example when people come off a fixed rate into a very different interest rate environment? That is a question that in its populism, this Government cannot seem to answer. Housing for All is a busted flush. In the lifetime of its signature plan all we have to thank it for is a 50% rise in homelessness, record rents, record house prices, and 4,000 homeless children. Yet, the Government swears blind its grand plan is working. The plan is failing and today's budget indicates that all it is going to do is fail better. The limp, anaemic vacant homes tax is set so low that it had to be reviewed before the bills can even be sent out. It was announced a year ago and the rubber still has not hit the road. The hands-off approach to vacancy and dereliction is an utter disgrace.

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