Ivana Bacik (Dublin Bay South, Labour) | Oireachtas source

This country has resources that are the envy of our neighbours. I refer to the Apple billions, record surpluses and low unemployment. However, in the Ireland of 2024, even workers with good jobs and their own homes suffer from a lack of public infrastructure and a cost-of-living crisis. Those without homes are suffering most. They are at the sharp edge of our housing disaster. It is not just that we do not have enough homes. We have overwhelmed health services, a lack of childcare places, creaking public transport infrastructure and stalled capital investment, along with rising household bills.

All of this results from a Government that is content to rely on laissez-faire policies and to hope for the best. That is why budget 2025 is so disappointing. This was a budget where the Government had the capacity to be transformational, to quote the Minister, Deputy Chambers's speech yesterday. It should have been a budget that delivered real sustainable change. It should have been a budget that stepped up with the necessary public investment to address the challenges this country faces. Instead, we saw what might be described as a glitter ball budget, a budget that was all glitter and full of shiny gimmicks, once-off payments, many of which will coincidentally fall to be paid in October and November. There was no goal, however. There is no real substance there that will make a difference for people in the longer term. That is not just an Opposition party speaking. I am looking at the headlines and commentary on the budget, which describes it as short-sighted, gimmicky and a pre-election giveaway and as lacking in vision. It is full of shiny tokens. My colleague, Deputy Nash, described it yesterday as a gravy plate budget, that is, all sauce and no substance, and I believe he is right. The Taoiseach has said that he makes no apologies for this budget but I really think he ought to because it represents a squandered chance and a wasted opportunity. That is the real tragedy. The Government has contrived to waste a boom.

This budget should have been the chance to focus on eradicating child poverty, giving all families and children hope for a better future, rewarding work and changing the dial on housing. That could have been done. We could have seen the serious investment necessary to get us to a point where the State is delivering social and affordable homes. We should have seen delivery of the significant investment the Minister, Deputy O'Gorman, in particular wanted to see in the just transition necessary to tackle climate change. This would have involved investing in renewables, cutting emissions and keeping homes warm. The budget could have delivered on the social contract and provided a social wage that would ensure that costs were cut for families and people who need healthcare, childcare and so much more. This budget could have been, as Deputy Duncan Smith said, a genuine workforce budget that enabled the building of capacity and increased staffing levels across our healthcare, childcare and eldercare systems. It could have increased capacity in the construction industry, allowing us to build the homes we need.

Instead of the sort of sustainable investment necessary to make that transformational change, we have seen a series of once-off measures. At a time of record surpluses and yet record homelessness, that is not good enough. It is not good enough for those without a home. I refer to those facing evictions, the families I talk with every day in my own constituency. They are facing the prospect of an eviction and have no support in this budget. It is not enough for families who are struggling every month to pay household bills. It is not enough for women - it is mostly women - who cannot go back to work because they cannot find a crèche place for their newborn baby. The Minister has claimed the newborn baby boost but it has been pointed out to us by many that the double payment of child benefit will not be of much help to those who need a crèche place. It has also been pointed out that there is an anomaly affecting babies born in December, leaving them excluded from both the double child benefit payments and the newborn baby boost. Babies born in October and November will get a payment but those born in December will be excluded as a result of a strange anomaly. I hope that is reviewed and reconsidered and that the grant will be backdated. In any case, these once-off measures are not enough to deal with the absence and lack of childcare places, the lack of classrooms for children with special needs and the fact that children are still waiting for assessments or therapies. It is not enough for people waiting on buses that do not arrive or hospital appointments that keep getting postponed or cancelled.

This Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil-dominated Government has squandered the opportunity to invest the money that is undoubtedly there in delivering real change. Instead, it has narrowed the tax base. It has increased one-off unsustainable spending. It has no ambition and no vision to deliver change. That is a real shame. Unlike other Opposition parties, we believe in the positive power of the State to make change. We believe that the capacity to make that transformation is and can be there. We have made great progress in this country over many years but we can and must do much better. We can and must invest public money to leverage the power of the State to build better together. That does not mean a few shiny gimmicks here and there or bribing people with their own money. It means using our resources sustainably to end marginalisation and investing in public services that we can all rely on. I refer to homes for all, reliable public transport, cleaner affordable energy and decent healthcare, childcare and eldercare.

In the budget document Labour published last week, we outlined key proposals to transform society and to address the chronic deficits we face today. We put forward proposals to deliver and develop a publicly provided childcare system, to ensure the building of more social and affordable homes at the scale needed, to tackle the cost of living, to address, tackle and end child poverty, to provide new climate measures like street-by-street retrofitting and to address the recruitment crisis in public services, lifting the recruitment embargo that apparently is not a recruitment embargo for some reason. We had proposals to deliver free GP care for all children. Instead, as Deputy Duncan Smith has pointed out, we will see children ageing out of free GP care this year and next. That initiative was originally brought in by Labour. We are now going to see parents forced to spend €60 or €70 per visit to the GP for children who have had the benefit of that scheme all the way up until now. It should have been expanded. We proposed a new autism and special needs guarantee to address the chronic deficit in provision for children with such needs.

I have spoken at length on housing initiatives Labour has proposed that could really help and support children who are without a home. I refer to our homeless families Bill and our renters' rights Bill. If the Government wishes to help those who are facing housing insecurity, it could pass those Bills. It is not cost that has prevented the passage of these Bills. It is ideology. It is not cost that has prevented the real and substantial addressing of homelessness. It is ideology, a lack of focus and a lack of ambition to end homelessness. That is incredible when more than 14,400 people are now in homelessness. This figure includes a devastating 4,419 children. That is a new and shameful record. Each figure represents a child forced to do homework on the floor of a hotel bedroom. The Government is continuing to miss social and affordable housing targets, which are themselves set too low.

Interestingly, I have attended a great many housing debates and panels in recent weeks as the spokesperson in our party on housing. These are cross-party panels. A recurring feature has been Fine Gael's notable absence from these panels. It appears the party has thrown in the towel on housing. Undoubtedly, there is some new money in the budget for planning and other measures, but it is not enough and it again lacks ambition or vision. We are still only funding the social and affordable housing targets set out in 2021. There has simply not been enough of an increase in the funding for the retrofitting programme we so badly need.

What would we in Labour do? Our proposals focus on increasing the supply of homes, ensuring protections for renters and tackling vacancy and dereliction. This is because we know that on the spending side, increasing the supply of homes is the best way to help those victimised by our housing disaster. We have called for significant and serious investment to ensure the transformation of the Land Development Agency into a State construction company to enable the delivery of homes at scale. We have called for protections for renters, a doubling of the rent tax credit, the introduction of a rents register and deposit protection scheme, ensuring the building of 22,000 social and affordable homes annually and the establishment of a new national retrofitting fund using some of the Apple money, which would create a real retrofitting revolution.

On childcare, we have put forward a radical programme for equal early years, setting out steps towards having a publicly-provided universal childcare system. Others speak about public funding, but that will not deliver the radical and sustainable change needed. For all the self-congratulation that Ministers have engaged in about childcare, only a €10 million increase has been provided to overall capital expenditure for childcare, with no reference to building or buying childcare facilities. The question about the delivery of and change in childcare is not about whether to spend money but how it is to be spent. We know the State is investing in childcare and subsidising it, but it is propping up a piecemeal system that is overly reliant on small private providers that themselves are struggling and, in some cases, are closing, with a consequent knock-on effect for families and children. These are children who deserve an equal start. We are seeing staff leaving the sector because of poor pay and conditions.

What do we propose? We propose the rolling out of 6,000 additional public childcare places each year to build out to 30,000 places over five years. We have also proposed the rolling out of a new childcare in situscheme, which is genuinely innovative, to allow for the underwriting of existing private services, where feasible and where the private provider wishes to withdraw its service. This would increase access to places without removing parental choice. We have also proposed a cap on costs for parents at €200 per child per month, as, indeed, we have proposed in our previous two alternative budgets. We also wish to tackle the pay of early years educators under the existing JLC format until we can see agreed public pay scales put in place. The Minister will be more aware than anyone that public funding for childcare in Ireland remains a fraction of what other European countries invest, but we need to move towards having a new vision for childcare based on a universal, publicly-provided model.

On education, we have also set out a vision for change because we all know the importance of education. Currently, far too many children are hindered by poverty in the school system. To address child poverty, Labour would introduce a new DEIS plus model. The original DEIS model, developed by the late Niamh Bhreathnach, is a proud Labour achievement, but many principals are calling for a second, focused stream of investment to break the cycle of intergenerational poverty. We have provided for initial funding of €3 million for the creation of a DEIS plus scheme. No Minister mentioned this at all, yet it is a key structural change that could address child poverty. Indeed, it is a scandal that today in Ireland hundreds of children had no special needs facility available to them at the start of the school year or had to travel long distances to access appropriate settings. This is why we have proposed an autism guarantee, a guarantee that the State will invest in planning to ensure suitable places and supports will be available every school year for every child and not the sort of scramble we see every single year for parents.

On disability supports, we proposed significant investment and it was disappointing to see only €10 million in the Government's budget for the children's disability network teams at a time when the responsible Minister predicts the waiting list will reach more than 20,000 children by the end of the year. The reality is that tens of thousands of children remain failed by this Government's policies and by this budget. Nearly 90,000 children in Ireland live in consistent poverty. This budget contains no vision on the eradication of child poverty. We have proposed constructive measures that would address and tackle child poverty and end child homelessness, thereby lifting society as a whole. We do not believe in trickle-down economics, but boost-up economics work. Our Labour budget contains practical, realistic and costed plans to address the real economic insecurity impacting people's lives and impacting far too many children. It would end the Hibernian Paradox of Ireland being a cash-rich country with poor infrastructure and services, a country, which, as Deputy Nash said, is rich but feels poor for far too many people.

We know the Taoiseach is likely to call an election very soon. He should name the date now and enable real debate on the choices facing voters. This is about choices and in this budget the Government made the choice not to make the transformational change that could have been carried out. The Government made the choice not to harness the power of the State to address the structural problems of inequality and poverty that bedevil this country. We in Labour have a conviction in the capacity of the State to make transformational change. As a party of the centre left, we believe there could have been a genuinely progressive budget. The Tánaiste used the word "progressive". I disagree with him. This was not a progressive budget, but it could have been. Unlike some of those who describe themselves as left wing, we recognise the need to tax wealth and not work. We endorse solidarity with those in the international protection system and in Ukraine. We welcome measures in the Government's budget that do provide that solidarity, but the Government's budget lacked a coherent vision and a sustainable plan to tackle structural disadvantage and structural inequality. Our fully costed plan to provide sustainable solutions for struggling households and communities around the country is what we need now. Our plan has a vision to build better housing together, to build better healthcare together and to build a better future for our children together because in Labour we believe we can build better together and that is what this Government should have done but, shamefully, has failed to do in budget 2025.

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