Richard O'Donoghue (Limerick County, Independent Ireland Party)

People may know me as passionate. I am actually speechless after seeing what the Government has brought into the budget, and I am not often speechless. I also feel empathy for the people who work in this country. I have had families on to me again today saying they were hoping they would have something in this budget that would help them to survive. Instead, the more they work - and they are taking on extra hours - the more tax they are now paying. One man told me he got a wage increase, as did his wife. Now, the tax bands have not moved and they will pay more tax. He said they had another problem. As they would now be paying more tax, they are getting caught, in that they will not get any relief for their family. They are borderline and do not get anything to support their family. Both of them are working. They have built and paid for their own house. They are mortgaged to the hilt. One of their children is now going to college and they are getting €500 towards their college fees when last year they got €1,000. They got a 50% decrease in payment and are paying more tax.

With the giveaway budget last year, we thought there was hope that the Government was going to look after the working class people. The man I spoke to said he would be better off at home, not working. His family would qualify for more if he was not working. His children would get educated in this country if he was not working. He questioned how he was going to make his children go out to work and ask them to work for the vulnerable and for their own future, which they have no problem doing, so they can support people when their own Government is treating people not even like second- or third-class citizens. It is not treating people like citizens at all. People thought slavery was gone out of the dictionary until it came to this Government. That is what they are saying to me.

The Government is now saying that the USC, which was brought in as a temporary measure, will give people more benefits. It should have been doing this already. It was brought in as a temporary measure and the Government kept it there. When is the Government going to stand up and look after the working person? If someone is self-employed in this country, he or she prices a job for somebody, goes in, does it on budget and on time to make a profit, and pays his or her taxes. That is accountability. Our Government can go and have a €853 million overspend on a children's hospital that is curved, which means extra maintenance after it has been built and it never can be extended onto. All the furniture, blinds and everything else are special order and more expensive when it should have been about the caring in the hospital. Build a box. Put all the caring stuff into that box and look after the vulnerable people. How many nurses, doctors and assistants could have been paid for by the embarrassing Government overspend on the children's hospital? How many hospitals could we have built on the overspend on the children's hospital, which has not even opened? In Limerick, a report that took 16 months to produce told the Government what was needed in UHL. People are in here giving out about UHL every day. I was one of them. It now transpires that UHL is looking after more patients coming through their doors from Limerick, north Cork, north Kerry, Clare and Tipperary. Per head, it has fewer people on trolleys based on the numbers who go through other hospitals. That is a fact. It came out in the report.

We asked the Government to lift the ban so we could have more people working in the hospital to look after and care for the people but it did not do that either. A report has now come out and it has given the answers I gave the Government on the first day in this Dáil. I have given the Government every opportunity but we have to waste money on the design of hospitals that are not even opened. From now on, I want this Government to design, deliver and build and to provide care in the building. I want design and delivery.

On Uisce Éireann, the Government goes on about building houses and that it is going to give a certain rate to build apartments. However, it cannot build anything without infrastructure and it is giving billions upon billions of euro to Uisce Éireann, which has not brought in one project on budget or on time. Would anyone be in business tomorrow morning if that was the case? No they would not.

The Government has given €10 to the elderly while on the other hand it put up the price of a bag of coal. Despite food inflation, it gave €10. These people who worked all their lives were hoping they would get the benefit of what they worked all their lives for. The Government gave nothing to farming or to tillage sectors.

Consider people who must use transport. What does the Government do? It increases the carbon tax again. Did the Government not look at the age of the vehicles on the roads at the moment? People cannot afford to upgrade their cars so the Government puts a carbon tax on those vehicles. That is what the Government has done. The carbon tax is on vehicles such as the trucks coming from the ports with food. They are travelling up and down the country. They come from Dublin Port which charges a tax. There are also transport costs, including putting tires on vehicles. Across the board, what does the Government do? It is puts on another tax. I hope people remember and do not return the same people again.

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