Jennifer Carroll MacNeill (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The past four budgets have successfully balanced the dual challenge of remaining responsive to economic and social developments while ensuring the sustainability of our public finances. Budget 2025 will build on and continue the enhanced investment in recent years in our society. The budget strategy generally has been framed in the context of a growing population and elevated price levels in recent years.

As set out in the summer economic statement, the strategy for budget 2025 has a number of aims, primarily to support households and firms, deliver improvements in public services, boost the resilience of the economy and further enhance our capital development and infrastructure, including, most importantly, housing. There will be an overall investment of €105.4 billion to deliver continued improvements in infrastructure and enhance public services to build for a stronger future. That planned level of expenditure will allow for the continuation of our planned approach to public spending, focused on delivering our economic, social and climate ambitions.

Given the growing population and record number of people in employment, I am conscious of the impact of elevated prices in recent years. It was decided in the summer economic statement that the 5% anchor the Government set on itself in 2021 was not appropriate to recognise the growth and expansion of services our country needs. It is important to recognise that. Instead, the Government provided a robust response to the challenges of population growth to ensure the most vulnerable in society were protected; supports were available for individuals, families and businesses, like, in previous times, the pandemic unemployment payment and, today, cost-of-living supports; our economic support was sustained and strengthened, as is reflected in the record high numbers of people in employment in this country; and the growing population was provided for with investment at a higher level of public service provision.

That strategy has a certain flexibility in allowing for essential adjustments to overall expenditure strategy, depending on the particular sets of challenges we faced. Those challenges have been considerable over the past five years and have changed greatly. All the time, we have tried to ensure the most vulnerable could be supported and provided for while growing the economic story more generally to ensure continued employment.

Our fiscal responsibility is an absolute priority. That is why the Minister, Deputy Donohoe, has managed to restore the public finances not once but twice in that five-year period. The Government strategy has provided cost-of-living supports for those who needed them while ensuring inflation has come down from a record high of near 9% two years ago to about 1.5% now. The reality is that, although the rate has come down, prices are much higher than they were and we must reflect that in our support. We are not simply an economy and are not looking for an A+ from an economist; we are trying to support a society as well as run a successful economy.

There are important questions about how we will fund infrastructure into the future and develop the resilience of the State. A record investment of €165 billion is set out in the NDP and the Government has demonstrated its commitment to increased infrastructural investment and delivery. Capital investment in 2025 will be almost €15 billion, which is the highest annual spend to date. The Government is investing sums well above the EU norms in the current and future years of the NDP.

That is a necessary investment and nothing to be clapped on the back about. It is essential critical infrastructure development for this State. It is important it is done and important also that it is recognised quite how much capital is there to be invested in this State at the same time.

It is important to say that the Minister, Deputy Donohoe, has taken over the delivery of the NDP projects. In response to the barriers to delivery of projects in the past, there has been a series of priority actions to improve delivery of infrastructure projects. There are new infrastructure guidelines that seek to balance the requirements for rigorous assessment of complex projects with the need to reduce administrative burdens on Departments charged with infrastructure delivery. Those changes to the guidelines seek to ensure a better understanding of the drivers of cost, timeline challenges and risks on a project and to provide a more realistic cost estimate a project approver can stand over. It is important to balance the need to be rigorous with the need to deliver and the Minister, Deputy Donohoe, now personally chairs the reconstituted Project Ireland 2040 delivery board which is charged with driving the delivery of the NDP. The combination of these delivery reforms will boost the delivery of critical infrastructure.

The Government has been delivering across the breadth of public services. Examples of this include 330 school building projects in 2023 and over 1,000 schools projects since the NDP started in 2018; significant reductions in outpatient waiting lists and improved health facilities such as the National Forensic Mental Hospital in Portrane; hospital extensions and new primary care centres and community nursing units across the country; significant upgrades to Ireland’s national road network and improvements to public transport systems including BusConnects; high-quality cultural and sporting amenities such as the sports campus in Blanchardstown; and the continued progress of the national broadband plan such that over 250,000 homes have now been passed and can avail of the high-quality connectivity offered by the plan.

There is of course a continued focus on youth mental health services, which my colleague the Minister of State, Deputy Burke, has already outlined. It is very important. Budget 2025 provides 95 new posts for youth mental health services, including additional staffing for child and adult mental health services, community teams and the expansion of CAMHS hubs teams, which are essential. The budget package within 2025 of €8.8 billion has three principal components: an increase of €5.2 billion in current expenditure; €1.6 billion of capital in line with the agreed allocations under the NDP; and a €2 billion cost-of-living package.

I will deal specifically with some of the issues that have been addressed in the last number of days relating to post-primary schools, smartphone-free education and the efforts by the Minister, Deputy Foley, to try to deliver smartphone-free education to our students. It is widely accepted by this House, CyberSafeKids and a range of other contributors from both education and mental health contexts that the use of smartphones can have a genuinely negative and damaging effect on the school day. Smartphones can cause distraction, create the risk of students experiencing cyberbullying and being exposed to harmful content and reduce the opportunities for social interactions and concentration. For this reason, the Minister, Deputy Foley, has introduced a one-off, targeted measure to support post-primary schools in the free education scheme by enabling them to implement a ban on mobile phone usage throughout the day. There are more than 400,000 students enrolled across more than 700 secondary schools in Ireland, so the funding represents a once-off cost of €20 per student in post-primary school. This investment of €9 million represents less than 0.1% of the overall education budget of €11.8 billion. The funding is intended to support positive well-being among pupils and students, and help them to disconnect, concentrate and make friends without the distractions that can arise from the use of mobile phones.

The initiative mirrors similar projects adopted in other states around the world, including by the Sinn Féin-led Northern Ireland Executive, which is piloting the use of lockable pouches in Northern Irish schools. It is doing so because evidence from the OECD and the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization shows the benefits of removing mobile phone use from children in schools. We have seen educational outcomes in schools in Belgium, Spain, the UK and a whole range of other places where mobile phones have been removed from schools. In truth, there are a number of different ways to approach this. Schools in many cases have already taken steps to ensure mobile phones are removed. I was in a school in Drogheda yesterday that has taken exactly those steps. When De La Salle College in Churchtown introduced self-locking pouches, staff reported better educational outcomes from the removal of mobile phones.

This is one part of a budget of close to €12 billion allocated to the Department of Education. There are other key features that are important for children. There is some €51 million in funding to extend the free school books scheme to students in transition year and senior cycle, meaning it will now support 940,000 children in primary, special and post-primary schools in the free scheme. It does not yet support all students because there are a number of other schools that are, for religious or other reasons, not included in the scheme yet but may be some day. There has been significant increase in the school funding with State funding per pupil. Obviously the capitation rate has increased from €224 per student in primary school and from €345 to €386 per student in post-primary school. There has been an additional €45 million in cost-of-living supports for schools in the free scheme to help them to deal with increased costs. Most importantly, there will be 768 special education teachers and 1,600 SNAs to support children across mainstream, special classes and special schools. In total, there will be over 44,000 dedicated staff to support children with special education needs in our schools.

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