Duncan Smith (Dublin Fingal, Labour) | Oireachtas source

The Government has done a remarkable job trying to frame this budget as a budget that has no losers and only winners, that it is a budget that will benefit everyone, particularly children and families. If we look beyond our shores economically, we can see that the three largest economies in Europe, namely, Germany, France and the UK, are facing gloomy economic predictions of varying degrees. What are we doing in Ireland with this budget? We are shrinking the tax base. We are inflating our spending and funding this through windfall taxes. That is what we are doing. We have been down this road before, and we know where it ends. This is a "when I have it, I’ll spend it" splurge of a budget, giving people back their own money in exchange for short-term votes and support. People will welcome any money that is going back into their pockets because no sooner is that in their pockets, it will be in the accounts of utility companies, the tills of supermarkets or used in trying to knock off a few bob from that credit union loan that had to be taken out just to get through the cost-of-living crisis people are still enduring. That is what this budget is doing. Where will the people who are supposed to benefit from this budget be in a couple of weeks' time or months' time? They will be in the exact same place they were yesterday, because that money will be gone to chase their tails.

The Government has positioned this budget to cover and help an awful lot of people and states it will only have winners. However, here are some losers. Nine-year-old children and above, who for their entire lives have benefited from the free GP care scheme will age out in massive numbers now, because Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil are not committed to free GP care, which was one of the greatest universalisations of healthcare in this country when it was first introduced by the Labour Party for those up to six years of age. It was only over the past eight years that two years were added. That has seemingly stopped. If you are a child on a waiting list for an autism class, this budget is of no use to you. It will not deliver any extra places or autism classes in any school in this country. There are just over 3,000 primary schools in our country. Only 1,000 of them provide autism classes. This budget does not rectify that in any real way, shape or form. If you are waiting for an assessment of need, about which there are some words in the Budget Statement, there is no detail because every budget delivered by this Government has had words about the assessment of needs waiting list. Yet, we still have huge waiting lists. Again, if you or your child is on that waiting list, they will remain on that waiting list because this budget will not help you. If you are waiting for speech and language therapy, OT or physiotherapy you will still be waiting because there is no detail in the delivery of the therapies and specialists needed to get those waiting lists down. If your child is waiting to be seen by CAMHS this budget will do nothing for you. If you are a medical card holder and currently unable to access dental treatment, this budget again has no detail that it is going to deliver for you. If you are a long-term carer about to lose your carer's allowance because your annual household income is marginally over the means test, this budget does nothing for you. That means test needs to go.

If you are a young worker hoping to enter one of our care professions in either a voluntary, community or acute setting this budget does nothing for you. I do not know if the Minister for Health, or any Minister or senior member of the Government was over in Buswells speaking to student nurses. They are referenced in the document, which says there will be more funding for student nurses. The issues with student nurses relate to their pay, to how they are working and that they have to take shifts as healthcare assistants, usually on the same wards where they are doing their student placement. When they are doing their healthcare assistant shifts, they are being asked to act up for nursing responsibilities, which means the very important job of healthcare assistant is not being done. This budget does not help that problem. What we needed was a workforce budget, a budget that was going to develop our workforce. That is not sexy or eye catching, but that is what this country needs.

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