Thomas Pringle (Donegal, Independent) | Oireachtas source

The first page of the budget 2025 expenditure report states: "Sustainable public expenditure requires both the delivery of better public services, infrastructure and living standards for the people of Ireland, and expenditure to be set at levels that can be maintained over the longer term." That is a far cry from what this budget actually contains, a bonanza of one-off measures with very little long-term planning and nothing to provide better public services or living standards. There have been many left behind by this budget and many promises broken. The budget in many ways gives with one hand and takes with the other. The general public sees this as well. I do not think people will be bought off in this way. They see through the Government's spin.

The Government has chosen to completely leave the seafood sector out of budget 2025. This shows that it has no interest or ambition for the fishing industry. Not a single cent of additional funding has been allocated to the seafood sector for 2025. This is in a week when the fishing industry is potentially facing a further 22% reduction in the north-western mackerel quotas, which will have a devastating impact on Ireland's fishing and pelagic processing sectors. This cut is a recommendation from the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea and is due to years of reckless overfishing by Norway, the Faroe Islands and Iceland, as well as the UK granting access to its waters in exchange for payments. These actions have severely undermined the mackerel stock and it is Irish fishermen who will suffer the consequences yet again. There is such an injustice to it all, yet the Government refuses to stand up for Irish fishermen. It refuses to provide any further allocation of funding to the seafood sector or coastal communities that have been decimated because of the inaction of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. The seafood sector gets a small portion of funding from the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine. The funding is so low that policy and strategy gets more than twice the departmental funding than the seafood sector does. The Government may say the seafood sector gets European funding but so do many other sectors outlined in the expenditure report, yet they still receive significant Government funding as well. Our fishing industry is experiencing a severe decline. The incredibly negative impact this has had on workers in coastal communities warrants significant Government funding and intervention regardless. The fact that the Government has refused to do this will be the final nail in the coffin for our fishing communities.

We should also be supporting our small farming communities better. This budget lacks targeted measures necessary to assist farm families in managing the cost of doing business, which has increased by an incredible 73% since 2017. We need to retain the €7,000 core annual payment limit and all applicants with commonage, irrespective of parcel size or scoring achieved, should receive a participation payment equivalent to at least €120 per hectare for the first 20 ha. These are the ways that we should be supporting farm families, not handing lump sum energy credits to every household in the country, including those that do not need them. An energy credit will not make the same difference to them as it could to so many others.

This is the third budget in a row that the Government has decided to do this. It has chosen to put money straight into the pockets of energy companies rather than the pockets of those who need it most. That is what the Government is doing when it is giving out these energy credits. It is encouraging energy companies to continue to hike their prices. Why would companies ever consider reducing prices when they know the Government is not only going to let them keep on increasing them, but is actually going to pay them to do it? It is the taxpayer who is paying the large profits of these energy companies. It is time to end these handouts and start putting money back into people's pockets.

Instead of funding big corporations in the way we do, we should also be investing more in international aid. This is something that gets overlooked in every budget. Ireland's official development assistance does not go far enough to meet the ever-increasing humanitarian needs and crises caused by conflict, climate and hunger. Year after year, Ireland has failed to meet the international commitment to spend 0.7% of GNI on overseas aid, which was agreed decades ago and reiterated in the programme for Government. We are nowhere near reaching this or meeting our climate finance commitments. This is a year in which conflict has raged, climate impacts have continued to cause chaos and marginalised communities in the global south continue to have their rights violated. We need to do more to assist those in need across the world and particularly in Gaza, where more women and children have been killed by the Israeli military over the past year than in the equivalent period in any other conflict over the last 20 years.

These are all areas in which we could be investing the €13 billion from Apple. We should be investing it in meaningful change for a better and more equal society, rather than accepting the inequalities that this Government continues to exacerbate with every budget. It does it because it suits this Government to have things stay exactly the same as they always have been, to continue giving tax breaks to the wealthy and handouts to the corporations, to continue with the privatisation of our essential services, pricing out those on lower incomes and forcing them further into poverty, and to continue to kowtow to Europe on fishing and America on Shannon. It is clear nothing will ever change under this Government, while Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil and the Green Party remain in power. The public will see this and they will see this budget for what it is, one lacking any substance or ambition.

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