Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE) | Oireachtas source

The Minister, Deputy Chambers, spoke earlier about the Apple tax money having "the capacity to be transformational". He did not mention, nor did the Minister, Deputy Donohoe, that, as Deputy Boyd Barrett has pointed out, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael fought tooth and nail not to take this transformative amount of money, to say that €14 billion should stay on the cash pile of one of the biggest, richest corporations in the world. He also did not mention that they wasted €10 million of public money in fighting that case. People will remember what happened around the Apple tax. It will be a focal point of the coming general election campaign because it epitomises the reality of politics and the class nature of the society we live in where, in the words of James Connolly, governments are committees of the rich to manage the affairs of the capitalist class. The truth is that this Government puts the profits of big corporations like Apple, of big developers and of big corporate landlords before the needs of ordinary people. That is the essence of the sort of Government we have.

In any case, against its own wishes, we now have the money. I actually agree with Deputy Chambers that it has the capacity to be transformational but is anyone in the Government actually making the case that this is a transformational budget? Where are the transformational changes in this budget? There is nothing that can be trumpeted as transformational. There are a few once-off payments and a few tax breaks, which I will get to presently, but where is the State construction company in the context of an unprecedented housing crisis with record house prices and rents and record levels of homelessness? Where is the public childcare? Where is the public provision of childcare, free at the point of access, in the context of families spending an extra mortgage every month for one child and an extra two mortgages a month for two children? Where is the investment in public transport, renewable energy and retrofitting in the context of the climate catastrophe that we are heading towards? There is no mention of the building of a national health service and no provision for a special class in every school across the country. There is nothing in this budget that can be pointed at as being transformational. In fact, it is the opposite of a transformational budget. It is a series of one-off, sometimes twice-off measures for ordinary people in social welfare and child benefit. There is a reduction in student fees but even the reduction in public transport fees is continued on a once-off basis.

It is the biggest scam ever, this once-off business where the Government comes in, year after year, and announces the same measures that it announced the previous year and expects to get some applause for it. This is all a very obvious ploy to try to continue the 100-year rule of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. We have once-off measures for ordinary people but permanent tax breaks for the wealthy of various sorts. We have an extension of the angel investor relief. I am sure millions of people across the country are breathing a sigh of relief that their angel investments will attract tax relief. There are extra incentives like the employment investment incentive, start-up relief for entrepreneurs, a start-up capital incentive, a series of extensions to capital gains tax relief and a new extension of relief for incorporated farms, which are agribusinesses. Fine Gael just put out a tweet with which I agree. The tweet contains a graphic that says "Fine Gael is backing business". One of the headline points the party is highlighting to show how it is backing business, proudly, is "no increase in sick leave days" and in brackets, "which were due to double in January". In what world is it a bad thing to increase sick day leave, in terms of public health or workers' rights? Fine Gael thinks it is a bad thing to do something that was promised. When the Government originally introduced the sick pay legislation, we pointed out that it was not baked into the legislation that the number of days would increase in the way the Government was saying they would. The Minister said that there was no need to worry about that because it would be done by ministerial order. Now, precisely as we warned, the Government is not doing it. Why? It is because Fine Gael is backing business.

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