Marie Sherlock (Dublin Central, Labour)

Beidh daoine ag féachaint ar an mbuiséad seo inniu agus á gceistiú féin cá bhfuil na gealltanais ó thoghchán 2024. Cá bhfuil an laghdú do theaghlaigh ar chúram leanaí nó na cúirteanna saor in aisce chuig an GP? Cá bhfuil na leabaí ospidéil bhreise agus na gealltanais eile? Beidh daoine ag rá leo féin conas gur féidir buiséad a fhoilsiú agus méid chomh beag sin a chur ar fháil do na daoine atá i mbun oibre sa tír seo.

4 o’clock

People are looking at this budget today and are asking where are the promises from election 2024, where are the childcare fee cuts, where is the free GP care, and where are the 4,000 extra hospital beds. They will wonder how a Government that has so much manages to do so little for working people. They will ask how is it that a country that can boast of having the healthiest set of public finances in the EU, the highest rate of economic growth, the highest rate of domestic demand and a general government budget that is in surplus has a Government that has so much but manages to do so little for working people. They will ask how is it that well over half a million children, over 600,000 children, are either in poverty, at risk of poverty, or living in real deprivation. How is it that those families are living through an appalling paradox of plenty in a housing and cost-of-living crisis and a Government that has a target for children in poverty? No Government should ever have a target for children in poverty. No child should ever grow up in poverty. We are a wealthy country and there are hundreds of thousands of people out there who feel they are going backwards rather than forwards even though our public finances are surging ahead.

They will wonder where are the bold, tangible commitments to climate action - the existential crisis of our time - so that clean and cheap energy can be for the many and not for the few and so that everybody's fuel bills can be permanently lowered? It is shameful that today this Government has barely said anything about climate.

I put it to the Ministers who are in the Chamber that the question that hangs over the budget and the financial management by their Government of the public finances is not what has been spent but how it is being spent and on whom. We have to go back a long time in Irish politics to see so much being spent on so few people. That is the reality of the tax cuts we see today for developers and for the small number of business owners in the hospitality sector. A serious cut to commercial rates or other targeted supports to cafés and restaurants would have been a better bet to secure business and jobs but this Government took the other option and has handed a very serious tax cut to a small number of business owners.

The Labour Party in government would have made this first and foremost a children and young persons' budget by putting in place measures to support families who work, families who want to work and families that cannot, by supporting family income and the introduction of a second-tier child benefit payment, by supporting families' ability to work through the provision of affordable and available childcare, by supporting families' ability to deal with the cost of living by extending free GP care, by expanding free public transport travel and by a permanent cut to third level fees. Instead, what did we get today? There is no extension to free GP care even though this was a Fianna Fáil and a Fine Gael commitment in the programme for Government. There is nothing on expanding free public transport to younger people, nothing on the drug payment scheme, and nothing on prescription charges. There was a mention of DEIS Plus, but what good is it if we do not see any figures alongside it? A €500 increase in third level fees is an extraordinary indictment of the failings of this Government. It has abjectly failed to integrate the social welfare system and the Revenue Commissioners' system so we could have a second-tier targeted payment for families with young children in this country.

We have some of the biggest tech firms in the world and still the Government cannot get its act together on this. Not only would a second-tier child benefit payment lift hundreds of thousands of children out of poverty but it would also ensure that the State supports can go efficiently to low-income households without any wrinkles or disincentives to work. Efficiency is supposed to be the buzzword of this Government but it is in short supply when we see the detail.

A critical part of supporting families out of poverty, into work and into a decent standard of living is the availability of affordable and accessible childcare. During the election last year one could not open a newspaper without seeing Government parties in a bidding war for families, saying they would lower fees and provide more places. All Members in this Chamber are aware of parents who are telling us that they have to delay going back to work and that women, in particular, have to cut back their hours because of the lack of available childcare. It is now 12 months on and there is barely a peep out of the Government now. This Government has reneged on its election promises to parents and to providers and all the while the problems are getting worse and not better.

Aside from the tiny increase for the access and inclusion model, AIM, support today the Government has nothing new in this budget for parents and providers with regard to childcare. The Minister, Deputy Chambers, made an announcement of 2,300 additional childcare places but let us be clear that this is a mirage. No parent listening to this today should get their hopes up of more childcare places. Last year parents across this country were told that more places were coming. In fact, they were told that €25 million was being put in place under the building blocks scheme to grow the numbers from just short of 40,000 to 60,000 by 2028. What has happened since then? Not a single extra place has been delivered through the scheme. Applications closed in January, feedback was due in March and funding was to be spent in total by this December. Instead, the contracts only arrived last week, last Wednesday to be precise, and between all of the paperwork to be processed and the tendering not as sod will be turned this side of Christmas. To make matters worse, providers will not be able to access core funding for a whole 12 months if those works are not completed by August of next year. There is the prospect of rooms being built and funded by the State but lying empty. It is an absolute insult to those who are desperately searching for a childcare place and to the providers who want to expand.

The mark of a country is the dignity with which our most vulnerable are treated within our health system. Right now there are far too many people languishing for hours on end on trolleys.

See this speech in context