Mary Lou McDonald (Dublin Central, Sinn Fein)

This budget comes at a time when ordinary households are reeling from a cost-of-living crisis that is out of control. Workers and families are hit by rip-off prices in every direction. It is getting harder and harder to make ends meet and to keep up, and it shows no sign of letting up. It is rent, big electricity and gas bills, runaway food prices, the cost of petrol and diesel, crippling childcare fees and extortionate insurance premiums. The list is as long as your arm. You name it, it is going up.

This budget should have been a cost-of-living budget, a budget to end the rip-off and make life affordable. It should have been a budget to address, with real purpose, the big challenges of our generation, to turn the tide of crises, to deliver the affordable and social homes people need, to build a health service where you get the treatment services and care you need, and to build a better, fairer society. Instead, what the Government has served up is a budget written by Fine Gael, as Fianna Fáil watches on, which abandons workers and families to look after those at the top. There is no action to end the rip-off and no break in tax for ordinary workers but big tax breaks for developers. People are left high and dry as prices soar, confirming without a shadow of a doubt that election campaigns are where Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil make promises and budgets are where they break them.

Promises are thrown in the bin by one of the most useless Governments ever.

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