Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein)

Another election promise broken. You have been involved in government for about 16 years and you have made a balls of it, I agree. Just like childcare, you have copied Sinn Féin's plan to abolish the means test for carers. Again, you are welcome to that policy, but let us get it implemented. What Government has done in this budget would mean it would take it more than a decade to abolish the means test for carers in relation to the amount of money that has been set aside, and that is not acceptable to us or indeed the carers of Ireland.

Let us get to the issue of housing because the housing crisis continues to deepen. It is dragging people down with it, and it is over a year since the Housing Commission, the Government's own commission, said that we need to see a radical reset in relation to housing. What did the Government do in that year? It built fewer houses than in the previous year. You could not make it up. The Government's response to the commission was to build fewer houses than in the previous year. The Government cannot even deliver on abysmally low targets. Why has this happened? It has happened because the Government is stuck to the same old failed policies and this budget will not fix the housing crisis. For many years now, I have been of the view that Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael will never fix the housing crisis-----

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