Micheál Martin (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

This is a budget for a modern country determined to protect its success and use its resources to permanently tackle key issues. It is a balanced, fair and progressive budget that significantly expands vital public services and supports. It is a budget that protects and promotes the economic success that generates the resources on which these public services and supports rely. Critically, it is a budget that shows urgency and ambition in further accelerating investment in home building, critical infrastructure, environmental sustainability and regional development. This budget is based on a belief in the core strengths of our country and a clear determination to deliver further progress.

Over the course of five budgets, we have implemented a consistent approach to helping families and businesses with vital supports and direct assistance through what has been by any measure a tumultuous period. I accept that we have provided more direct aid for families and expanded services more than the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council recommended. However, it is our assessment that urgent needs and our rising population require this additional funding. We do this within reasonable boundaries, especially given the overall size of the economy. We have also acted to create reserve funds that will help to maintain services during a major downturn and ensure the delivery of economically essential investment programmes.

Even then, we have come nowhere near meeting the always escalating demands of Opposition parties. For them, the economic and fiscal background to the budget is irrelevant. I am satisfied that we have struck a reasonable balance between addressing urgent needs, investing in the future and protecting against a downturn. In this, we have a record of substantial achievement on which to build.

We have heard an extraordinary level of nonsense so far concerning the money we are receiving as a result of the European Court of Justice’s ruling on past tax arrangements with Apple. We were entirely correct in demonstrating that we would behave in a transparent and trustworthy way in defending our tax agreements and arrangements, and because we did so, we have protected revenues that are worth many times more than relate to this one case.

It has become increasingly clear that most of the Opposition has no interest in the policies that deliver jobs for workers and revenue for public services. The self-proclaimed parties of the workers are nothing of the sort. Our anti-worker, anti-climate action, anti-trade and anti-reserve fund Opposition is the least progressive to be found anywhere in Europe. When delivering lectures here demanding that windfall revenue be spent more rapidly, the Opposition should perhaps take a moment to remember that it angrily attacked every policy that generated that revenue in the first place. We have chosen a responsible and far-sighted approach to handling revenue that is either one-off or uncertain over the long term. Our overwhelming approach is to invest in our country’s future and increase the productive capacity and sustainability of our economy so that we can deliver pensions and public services well into the future. There is no doubt that a refusal to spend everything now carries with it political risks. Even with significant increases in spending, we have not pleased everyone. However, it is the right thing to do. It learns from the past experiences of Ireland and many other countries and shows our seriousness about maintaining a strong economy and high employment.

One of the last things that the Opposition likes to talk about when discussing the budget is the economy, but the facts show our record in helping to steer Ireland’s success through dramatic challenges. During the past four and a half years, we helped our country through a series of economic shocks of historic proportions. We managed the aftermath of Brexit, involving the departure of our largest trading partner from the Single Market to which we belong. We managed to protect lives and livelihoods threatened by the fastest moving recession ever recorded in peacetime and the immediate closure of much of the economy as a result of the pandemic. We managed to help families and the economy as a whole through a worldwide series of simultaneous supply chain, energy price and cost-of-living disruptions of a scale not seen for eight decades as a result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In spite of these shocks, we have ensured that we today have record levels of employment, record levels of investment in public services, record levels of direct aid for families and investment funds that will protect this progress.

On the day this Government was formed in 2020 and I was honoured to be elected as Taoiseach, we promised to restore our country, and we did. Today, there are 593,000 more people in work, there are 115,000 more homes, wages are again growing faster than prices and our financial situation is strong enough to fund dramatic investments in overcoming real problems in housing and other areas. A coalition government is, by definition, made up of parties with different priorities. We cannot and should not be expected to agree on everything. During the negotiation of the programme for Government, we stressed our belief in investment in public services and support for pensioners and our eagerness to take responsibility for some of the toughest challenges. Each party had a deep impact on the programme, and every day since my party’s members ratified the programme in the largest internal vote ever held by an Irish political party, we have worked in good faith to respect our colleagues and their distinct positions.

Personally, I have always operated on the principle of supporting good ideas wherever they came from and work together with Ministers from each party to help them promote our shared agenda.

I acknowledge the close and productive work carried out by the Ministers, Deputies Donohoe and Chambers, in recent months. None of the undeniable economic progress achieved in recent years has been acknowledged by any member of the Opposition because, fundamentally, they are incapable of acknowledging any positives in our country. They are so dedicated to a model of total opposition that they brush aside inconvenient facts. They put politics first in everything. If you cannot acknowledge what has been achieved, how can you protect it? How can you build on it? It is, unfortunately, the sad reality of so much political debate in the last few years that the Opposition has been reduced to a cynical and relentless serious of attacks-----

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