Eoin Hayes (Dublin Bay South, Social Democrats)

All around the country this evening, at this very moment, there are children sitting hungry at a table in a kitchen or in a cramped hotel room of emergency accommodation. They are hungry or their parents are hungry. That is the choice for too many families. Now, as the hunger rumbles in their bellies, the heating is off and those families are cold. The tables may be bare and rickety, the curtains or bedding may be worn and too old. It is hard to do your homework on an empty stomach, nearly impossible. For 8.5% of the children in this country, nearly one in every ten, this is the reality of their evening tonight. They are in consistent poverty according to the Government's own statistics. According to the ESRI, as many as one in five children is experiencing this kind of Dickensian level of deprivation.

On the quays however, or in the lavish converted Georgian offices of the squares of Dublin 2, in a boardroom the table is solid and heavy and immovable. The bellies are full, perhaps too full. There are crystal glasses and newly bought bottles of sparkling water imported from some spring hundreds of miles away. The carpets are freshly cleaned and there might be canapés that go uneaten or bottles of wine on ice. Those rooms do not know poverty or hunger or cold. Those rooms are full of people who have never done better.

Budgets are about choices - not just choices between numbers or policies or votes, but choices between people and what we believe in. Does this Government believe in alleviating suffering or does it believe in indulging greed? In the budget the Government presented yesterday, it set aside €300 million to alleviate child poverty. It is, in itself, welcome. I genuinely applaud the Minister for public expenditure when he said that a multi-year programme of supports began yesterday. It is the start of a difference to many. In 2026, however, it will not go far enough. The Parliamentary Budget Office today published a report saying child poverty will actually increase in 2026 under this budget. The Taoiseach lauded himself today, saying the bottom two deciles would do better from this budget, but the Parliamentary Budget Office says their income will actually go down.

On the other side of the world, however, in boardrooms in Beijing, London or Manhattan, shareholders in Irish property companies will receive a memo and they will reach to uncork the bottle of champagne. They will read that this Government gave them double what it gave the poorest children in Ireland. It gave them €615 million to build apartments they are already building, the most expensive, most lucrative and smallest apartments in Europe. The shareholder party is now never-ending. Irish Residential Properties REIT plc made €30 million in profits last year, driven by €65 million in net rents. Cairn Homes made €115 million in profits in 2024. This Government gave them more profits when they did not need any and, worse, it indulged them when they were already overgorged.

There are alternatives. The Social Democrats chose to spend the same €615 million on lifting tens of thousands of children out of poverty with a second tier of child benefits targeting the most vulnerable children in our Republic. We even made sure we balanced and paid for it by asking those boardrooms to contribute more, phasing out subsidies for developers, increasing the levy on the banks and increasing the stamp duty on non-residential property. There was a choice yesterday, and in that choice the Government proposed the most regressive, corporatist tax package in a generation. The Government chose to continue the extreme indignity of child poverty for too many families. It left working people out in the cold and it rewarded greed.

It is the great shame of this Government that it did not choose differently, and it is the great failure of our politics that the scourge of child poverty will persist despite what was a unique generational opportunity to end it.

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