Mary Lou McDonald (Dublin Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

It will come as no surprise to anyone who takes an interest in Irish political life that the Tánaiste and the Taoiseach spent a disproportionate amount of their time ráméising about Sinn Féin. Had they any confidence in their own actual budget and performance in government, they would have structured their remarks rather differently. It is small wonder because the budget comes at a time where we have a major crisis in housing, we have a crisis in health services and the soaring cost of living is writ large, impacting on the daily lives and aspirations of workers, families and especially on our young people. This should have been a housing budget, first and foremost. It should have been a budget to kick-start a transformation of our health service and to make life affordable again, with ambitious action to cut living costs. Instead, the Taoiseach and the Tánaiste are not here. They had much to say, they talk a lot but listen very little. They took their responsibilities to make real and lasting differences in these areas. They essentially kicked for touch with an auction budget that does very little really to improve people's prospects in the long term.

Of course, it is 13 years since a Fianna Fáil Minister for Finance introduced a budget. We all know the reason for that hiatus. The party of the Tánaiste, Deputy Micheál Martin, crashed the economy. Deputy Micheál Martin sat in Cabinet when the Government decimated public finances, drove the housing market off a cliff and scattered our young people to the four corners of the globe in search of work and opportunity. Therefore, he will have to excuse us and those who suffered at their lack of good judgment and good governance if we take his homilies on economic prudence, prosperity and advancement with a very large dose of salt.

They say that a week is a long time in politics. Well, 13 years is a lifetime. There has been more than a decade to change and build a fairer, better and more equal Ireland. Budget 2024 is the fourth budget from this Government, the eighth budget co-authored by Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil joined at the hip, and of course the 13th budget from Fine Gael since it came to power in 2011. Every one of those budgets represented a chance to deliver change, to put ordinary people first, yet all we ever got is more of the same: a budget in which ambition, imagination and vision are decidedly absent and there is a recycling of broken promises that created and embedded problems. This budget is just the latest chapter in a story of failure written by parties and by a Government devoid of ideas, out of touch with the challenges that face ordinary households, lacking in energy and now increasingly running out of time.

We had a housing crisis before this budget and we will have a housing crisis after this budget. Our health service was under enormous pressure before this budget; our health service will be under even more pressure after this budget. Life for so many was unaffordable before this budget and life will be unaffordable after it.

I frequently remind the three men, only one of whom is here, who lead this Government that they came to office saying they would fix housing. That was their pledge. If ever anyone needed proof as to why you should never allow those who created a problem to try to solve it, then the proof is in this budget. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have provided it in spades. People are crying out for affordable homes, to be able to put a secure roof over their heads. Hundreds of thousands of renters are ripped off every month. More than 12,000 people live in emergency accommodation including almost 4,000 children who grow up without a place to call home. Sky-high house prices mean that so many of our younger generation are locked out of homeownership. They look, therefore, for a better life and a better chance in Boston, Toronto and Perth, far away from their families, their friends and their communities. The housing crisis has now literally seeped into every facet of our society and our economy. It is little wonder that employers struggle to hire workers, hospitals struggle to hire nurses and schools struggle to hire teachers. Yet the Taoiseach claims the Government housing plan is working. On the watch of Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, housing has gone from crisis to emergency to full-blown social disaster. If this is their definition of success, God help us should we ever see one of their failures.

To look at the budget announced yesterday by the Ministers, Deputies McGrath and Donohoe, you would think that housing was not an issue at all. You would imagine that everything is rosy in the biodiverse garden. Nothing to see here; move on. However, the reality is that those caught up in this housing disaster cannot move on. They are stuck, unable to get a mortgage and trapped in the nightmare of the private rental sector, and more adults than ever find themselves unable to move out of the family home. Last night, I listened to one young man in his 20s talking about how at his age, his parents were married, had a home and they had two kids. However, for him, his life is on hold. This budget should have been and could have been about changing things for that young man and for his generation. It was an opportunity to change direction, an opportunity to provide the necessary investment for a massive scaling up in the delivery of affordable and social homes that people need, and an opportunity to act decisively to finally tackle extortionate rents, but the Government has chosen to squander that opportunity.

Incredibly, it has not provided a single cent of additional capital funding for affordable and social housing while the situation gets worse by the day. Last year, budget 2023 provided €2.6 billion in Exchequer capital for housing. Budget 2024 provides exactly the same, with no ramping up of targets that were already too low, and well they know it, and no ban on soaring rent increases. Incredibly, this budget is doing nearly twice as much for landlords as for renters. Another big transfer of public money into the coffers of landlords is not the big idea needed to address the dysfunctional and exploitative private rental sector.

There simply are no excuses anymore. There are no excuses for Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael anymore in housing.

The longer they have been in government, the worse housing has become. Renters and aspiring homeowners will be stunned that there was no increase in capital spending and there were no new targets despite the Government having the money to make a decisive intervention. You see, there is no real determination to get to grips with this crisis. Frankly, at this stage the Government is negligent and reckless, not to say incompetent. Those who are in desperate need of housing will today scratch their heads in frustration. They will ask: where is the urgency? Where is the pace? Where is the ambition to fix housing? They will not find it in this budget.

A Sinn Féin Government would be different. That is true. The Taoiseach and Tánaiste commented on that. It would be absolutely different. We would introduce a housing budget, a defining budget for our times. We would deliver the investment to drive the biggest house-building programme in the history of the State. For this budget, we proposed an additional investment of €1.7 billion to deliver 21,000 affordable and social homes. This was way above the Government's target. That is the scale of ambition - and more - that will be required to fix housing, but the Government does not get it. It seems to me that they do not want to get it, quite frankly, at this stage. It is laughable that Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil claim to be the parties of homeownership without ever bringing forward a credible State-led plan for affordable housing.

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