Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

Faced with an utterly catastrophic housing and homelessness crisis and with unprecedented resources available to it, this Government did absolutely nothing in its budget to deliver additional social and affordable housing. It has decided, in its bloody-minded way, to stick to a plan that has left us with record and ever-worsening numbers of people in homelessness and where rents are absolutely stratospheric and unaffordable for the vast majority of young people of working people, as are house prices. The Government did not use the billions available to it in order to expand, accelerate and increase the delivery of the public and affordable housing we need to resolve the housing crisis and the housing misery being suffered by hundreds of thousands of people. This is, as Deputy Paul Murphy said, exemplified in the contrast between the treatment of hundreds of thousands of people paying extortionate rents and the treatment of landlords in the budget decisions that were made yesterday. There is €88 million for all the renters crucified by unaffordable rents and double that amount in a tax break for the landlords who are charging those unaffordable rents.

You could not make it up. It is not rhetoric when we say this is a landlords' Government. It brazenly demonstrated that yesterday. There is twice as much for landlords as for crucified renters.

The mortgage interest relief is a sick joke compared with the mortgage interest hikes being suffered by tens of thousands of people. I was talking to a single mother yesterday whose mortgage interest payments have increased by €7,000 in the past year because of the banks and the ECB having ratcheted up interest rates ten times. She is paying €7,000 more and the Government is going to give her back a maximum of €1,250. Where on earth is a single working mother supposed to get the rest of the money to pay those mortgage interest hikes? This is being done by banks that are recording staggering, obscene, record profits and the Government refuses to act against the profiteering of the banks and vulture funds. It is simply unbelievable.

There are many other points I could make but I want to give a shoutout to another group. In the past week, PhD researchers marched to the Dáil and demanded they get a stipend and be recognised as workers who are holding together research and innovation at our third-level institutions with their teaching. Some of them get no pay, while others earn less than the minimum wage. They asked for a stipend of €30,000, and there is not a cent extra in the budget for research, innovation and science but a 3% cut. Multinational corporations, however, which are recording extraordinary profits, have been given a new research and development tax break worth €27 million on top of the €750 million a year they get from that break.

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