Joan Collins (Dublin South Central, Independents 4 Change) | Oireachtas source

Double child benefit payments should not just be for Christmas as the Minister referred to in her Christmas babies speech. They should be for childhood. That is why the Government should have implemented the second tier of child benefit recommended by the ESRI and many other organisations fighting for children's rights. That is why, in order to make real progress and reduce child poverty, we needed to see the increase for a qualified child go up by €6 per week for children under 12 and €15 per week for children aged 12 and over. That is why the core welfare rates increases of €12 per week fall significantly short of the €20 increase needed to restore their real value to 2020 levels. This was a shameless election budget. This was a giveaway budget by a Government that has given up trying to address the real fundamental issues facing this country. I always welcome any supports to help people make ends meet, but these once-off payments will be quickly eaten up by rising costs of living, rent, heating or health costs. The Government may as well have given the money straight to landlords and the energy companies. When the money is gone, this budget will not have moved us an inch in fixing the serious housing crisis, the crisis in our health service or across our public services. Young people will still leave in their droves as housing prices go up and people's standard of living goes down. This budget does zero to address the structural problems in this country. In its response to the budget, the Irish Congress of Trade Unions said:

Budget 2025 does nothing to solve the range of structural flaws in our economic model. There is no obvious long-term vision to fix the long-standing crises in areas such as housing, childcare, or infrastructure delivery.

There you go, the Government has given up.

We are a wealthy country, but working-class people see none of it. There is more than enough money to address the problems we are facing if the wealth were more fairly distributed. The top 1% in Ireland owns €230 billion in wealth, whereas the bottom 50% only owns €9 billion. There is a deep need for change so ordinary people get their fair share. This budget has once again shown that Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Green Party are the biggest block to that change. There is a huge concentration of political and economic power in the hands of very few at the top of society. The result of this is that the political system over successive Governments has placed profit at the heart of State policy at the expense of everyone else. This is why people cannot find homes, but big developers, speculators and landlords make billions off the housing crisis. It is reflected by a policy of increasing the stamp duty on investors buying ten or more houses from 10% to 15% - a miserly increase. That is why hundreds of thousands of people are living in poverty and millions more are struggling to make ends meet while the 1% has gained 70 times more wealth than the bottom 50% in the past ten years. This is a budget that will make that inequality worse. I again quote ICTU, which states:

Throwing money from tax cuts into an economy at full capacity will simply raise prices and ultimately erode the gains from the tax cuts. The biggest winners from the tax changes will be the very wealthiest families benefiting from inheritance tax cuts as well as those on higher incomes that stand to benefit from all of the changes to personal taxes. The relative losers are those without wealth and workers on lower incomes.

In this budget, someone earning €100,000 per year will receive more than four times back in tax as someone earning €25,000. The Minister for Finance said in the lead-up to this budget that the average worker would receive €1,000 back in tax and cost-of-living once offs. Someone in the top bracket will get a permanent tax cut far in excess of that.

While the 80 cent increase in the hourly rate for the minimum wage is welcome, €13.50 is significantly less than the €14.75 per hour recommended by the living wage technical group. What workers need is collective bargaining as proposed by the EU adequate minimum wage directive, a Bill on which I introduced earlier this year supported by the trade unions. That along with expanded public health services is what will really help workers in the long run.

This budget has cut inheritance tax to the tune of nearly €90 million. The most significant tax cuts will only be for the wealthiest 3% of people. This will further entrench wealth inequality, as it is passed down unearned from generation to generation. In contrast, the Government has delayed changes to sick leave and pensions for workers until mid-2025, which leaves workers worse off. It is a contrast for a Government that after five years has refused to increase social welfare or pensions in line with inflation. Once the once-off payoffs are gone, ordinary people will be left behind. We needed change in this budget. We needed to change the fact that for ordinary people this is a high-tax country with broken public services, but if people are rich, it is a low-tax country and they can afford to go private. SIPTU explained that our low-tax status is almost exclusively due to extremely low employers' social insurance contributions, PRSI, and to a lesser extent low capital taxes. Those are the extremely low employers' PRSI contributions, which the Government has left untouched in this budget, and the capital taxes it has cut. Research by the Nevin institute found that the implicit tax rate on workers in Ireland is 15% above the EU average, while employers' PRSI is 56% below. Regressive taxes on consumption are above the EU average while our taxes on capital are less than half those in Germany, Denmark, Belgium, the UK and Italy, and less than a third of those in France. That is what a tax policy looks like when we have a country run for those with wealth at the expense of ordinary people. Unless we make structural changes to how we fund and run our State and unless we take profit out of Government policies, we will never make real progress on addressing the crisis in housing, the cost of living or health. There is a need for change in Ireland. This budget does not offer it. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael will not offer it. We need a left government willing to make that change and run this country for the benefit of workers and communities, not the superrich.

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