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

We have heard the Government oscillate between self-congratulatory backslapping and defensive, self-righteous attack rhetoric, neither of which is grounded in any sense of reality. I notice the Taoiseach is not here to participate in this debate. That is a first in my recollection. Perhaps, after all the bragging and hot air, the Taoiseach cannot present himself to stand by and stand over his budget. I am curious to know why he is not here.

This could and should have been a budget to turn the page on the persisting and ever-worsening crises in housing, health and on what is an overwhelming cost-of-living crisis for so many households; to address the biggest barriers for ordinary people fulfilling their dreams and ambitions; to make Ireland a better place to build a good future; to finally give a generation of young people the hope and the real opportunity to build a secure and prosperous life here at home; to change direction and invest with ambition in a new future where people can put an affordable roof over their heads, whether they wish to buy a home of their own, rent a home or acquire a council home that provides security; to make sure people get healthcare and treatment when they need it, see a GP when they are sick and be confident that an ambulance will arrive on time and that they will have the dignity and will not be left on a trolley in a corridor or on a waiting list for years on end; to provide childcare that does not break the bank and begin the work of building a modern, public childcare system; and to deliver real help with the cost of living to make a long-term difference when it comes to meeting the barrage of bills that land week in and week out. This is the budget Sinn Féin would have introduced yesterday.

When the dust clears, the fanfare fades and the spin dies down, it is clear that the Government's budget has no horizon beyond an election campaign. It is big on short-term, once-off measures but with no answers to the big questions and big pressures in people’s lives. There is no plan, no direction ahead, even with unprecedented resources. Even in a time when money really is not an issue, the Government cannot rise to solve the obvious hardships and crises that give rise to so much pressure and despondency in our society.

As the saying goes, "You can fool some of the people some of the time but you can’t fool all the people all of the time". The Government's budget is a three-card trick. It asks people to look over there at the big numbers, the big money, to distract them from the young couple who will continue to save and save but cannot buy a house, from the daughter who will still live in the box room of her parents’ house with her kids, from the child with scoliosis and spina bifida who will continue to wait in agony and from the low-paid worker who will still have to choose between heating or eating.

The Government is spending billions. It has billions more to invest and yet it cannot name one major challenge that it is resolving. It cannot point to one big crisis it is fixing. It cannot tell us one single way it will make people’s lives better for the long term beyond the election campaign. It is all frantic energy but no substance, no new ideas and, most importantly, no results. The Government is hoping that the big numbers will hide all of that. When we cut through all of the spin, in the long run it is just more of the same. It is actually another version of the Government's budget from last year. Its public relations and soundbite machine wants people to believe that this is somehow a shiny new Government. The Government has done the taoisigh hokey cokey. We have had three different taoisigh since 2020 but this coalition has been in office for more than four years. This is its fifth budget and failure is written across each of them.

Yesterday, the Minister, Deputy Donohoe, described this budget as a budget of hope. Hope for whom? Is it hope for the vulture funds, big landlords or the banks? When Fine Gael talks of hope it is simply code for telling working people and ordinary communities to wait for improvements that it has no intention of ever delivering. We know this because it has shown us again and again. Fine Gael has been in government for nearly 14 years and has been joined at the hip with its friends in Fianna Fáil for the last eight of them. It has had over a decade to do things differently and finally deliver for workers and families but no. It is incapable of changing direction; it is not in its DNA. That is why budgets will come and go but nothing really changes for those who need change the most.

This budget is directionless, lazy, copy-and-paste politics from the Government's tired old playbook. It is the recycling of the same failed policies and broken perspective. The money and resources are there and the excuses are gone but the political will from the Government to deal with the big challenges of the day is absent. Let us just call it like it is. Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil are the problem. There was a housing crisis before this budget and there will be a crisis after it. Our hospitals were overcrowded before this budget and they will be overcrowded after it. Parents needing affordable childcare before this budget will still need affordable childcare after it. By the way, a Thánaiste, and to the Taoiseach in absentia, there was a cost-of-living crisis before this budget and when all the one-off money has been spent, there will be a cost-of-living crisis after it. Sinn Féin proposed a cost-of-living package to bring the very necessary and immediate relief that people need in the here and now and beyond the vista of an election. The Government failed to grasp this. Its energy credit will be cancelled out by extra charges. The benefit of its rent credit will be erased by further rent hikes that it has refused to stop.

In his speech to the Fine Gael Ard-Fheis in April, the Taoiseach said “We have to fix housing once and for all.” He plucked a figure out of thin air just to grab headlines. Another soundbite that followed was Micheál Martin’s claim that the Government would fix housing. This followed Leo Varadkar’s promise to make housing his main priority. That was three taoisigh, with three empty promises and promises broken.

I wonder if the Taoiseach noticed the housing crisis before coming to office. Did the Government not notice it while sitting at the Cabinet table for eight years? It is clearly banking on those in housing need who need a home of their own - the ripped-off renters, the generation left behind - having some form of amnesia and on their memories being faulty.

This budget is no different from what has gone before. The Government has ignored the call of its own Housing Commission for a radical reset in housing. Let us break down the Government's offering. There is no additional funding beyond what it has already committed, no increase in its inadequate targets and not one extra social or affordable home. It beggars belief. The Government has no intention of cracking housing affordability for working people.

Instead the Government has chosen to double down on policies and turbocharge schemes that hang a price tag of €500,000 on its so-called affordable homes. What planet is the Government living on?

What of renters who have been hammered by rent hike after rent hike? On the Government's watch people are paying on average more than €6,000 extra a year in rent. The Government offers a renters' credit but again, it refuses to stop rent increases. For this measure to have an impact one must do both things but the Government is not prepared to do that. What does this mean? It means that in reality, this is a €1,000 bonus for landlords, for greedy vulture funds, and for wealthy property funds, not for hard-pressed renters looking for relief. Some have described this as a giveaway budget but this is the budget in which the Government officially gives up on housing and has thrown in the towel. The budget is a recipe to ensure that house prices will continue to go up beyond the reach of working people. Extortionate rent will continue to go up and the number of people, including children, cast into the nightmare of homelessness will go up. There will be more children growing up in bed and breakfast accommodation and hotels and more children robbed of the childhood they deserve. The consequences of the housing crisis belong to Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael and they need to own that fact. It is a crisis that has sent young nurses, teachers and gardaí to Perth, Toronto and Boston in search of the opportunities denied to them at home by the Government's bad decisions. This is a defining disgrace of the Government. Our young people are denied the opportunity to build futures at home, or to return home to their country to live and contribute here. It is a shameful state of affairs in a time of plenty. It is utterly unacceptable to us.

Sinn Féin has the plan to bring the housing crisis to an end. We will make housing affordable, bring homeownership back into reach for working people, and build 300,000 homes in five years, a figure arrived at by listening to the experts, including the Government's own Housing Commission. The Government should try that some time. In our budget, we set out how we could deliver 21,000 social and affordable homes next year, put a month's rent back into people's pockets, and stop rent increases for three years. There are no half measures here gentlemen but real solutions. The Sinn Féin plan, A Home of Your Own, will transform housing in Ireland and will give back the hope of a generation that has been stolen by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. We will be ready to start delivering it from day one. That is real energy because it is backed up with a real plan and real action.

The Taoiseach has said that he remembers the names and faces of children with scoliosis and spina bifida who were left for years waiting in agony for life-changing surgery. I wonder whether the Taoiseach and his colleagues remembered their names and faces when they sat down to write this budget. It compounds the damage that has been caused by making and breaking a promise to these children when Simon Harris was Minister for Health back in 2017. Seven years on and that promise still has not been kept. This budget ensures that these children will continue to wait in pain and continue to deteriorate and some of them will run out of time. That is the heartbreaking fact.

As their parents listened on to the budget, they also must listen to all Government Members deny, distance, and evade responsibility for the national children's hospital debacle. The Taoiseach was the Minister for Health who greenlit this project and the contract with the developer. He promised back in 2019 that the hospital would be finished. A former Taoiseach also went so far as to say it would happen unless a meteorite struck, but I put it to an Cathaoirleach Gníomhach that there was no meteorite and there is no hospital. Here we are now in 2024 and nobody in government can tell us when the hospital will open much less what the final costs will be. That reality and that truth does not fit neatly into a soundbite or the narrative of spin that now surrounds this Government.

Last year this Government left a €3 billion hole in the health budget with disastrous consequences. The recruitment embargo has to top that list. This was an incredibly reckless Government decision when our health system is crying out for staff needed to deliver the care people need. Again this time around there is no clarity or transparency on the funding of the health service. The Government talks of hope but there is very little in this budget to give people hope when it comes to healthcare. There is very little to expand capacity in our hospitals and increase the number of beds to the levels required in community or in mental health. We have heard story after story of older people in particular and the very ill left on hospital trolleys. They will find it very hard to find any hope in this budget. The Government has provided only €120 million for new current expenditure. This is paltry when we consider the scale of the challenge.

The Government has given enough just for things to stand still and it tries to present catch-up money as new investment. It is not. People will see through this because people will be hit hardest with the consequences of this decision. Where is the vision and where are the measures to tackle crisis waiting lists, to reduce the costs of healthcare and medicines in a meaningful way, and to invest in community and local services? It is not in the Government's budget but the Tánaiste will find that vision in Sinn Féin's budget proposal for 2025 where we propose an ambitious additional investment of €672 million for current expenditure and €312 million for capital expenditure. That is €860 million more than the Government offers, and every bit of it is needed. Our proposal would provide 150,000 extra medical cards for working families, reduce the cost of medicines for all families, bring in a price reduction for the drug payment scheme to have it kick in at €50 rather than €80, and we would phase out prescription charges over three years. Our proposals would allow us to begin the work of delivering 5,000 hospital beds and 2,000 community beds by 2031. These are the plans that set the bedrock of the road to universal healthcare that is free at the point of care in the next decade. To address the scandalous waiting list and to repair our mental health services that are on their knees this is what is needed but the Government does not get it and never will.

Parents and families cry out for affordable childcare. Many spend the equivalent of a second mortgage on fees. The Taoiseach raised expectations that the Government would do something impactful in the budget to bring down those high costs but this budget dashes those expectations. Again, clearly the Taoiseach was more interested in grabbing headlines than in actually doing the work to deliver the change, improvements and relief that parents badly need. There is nothing new to make childcare affordable. There is nothing to build capacity and to deliver the increase in childcare spaces so badly needed. Critically, there is no clear commitment to increase the pay of early years educators and childcare professionals to a fairer level. This is a real betrayal of the parents of Ireland.

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