Rose Conway-Walsh (Mayo, Sinn Fein)

There is a lack of transparency around this budget. It is disgraceful. Despite having 15 Ministers and 23 Ministers of State, we have no costings of existing levels of service. How does the Government know what is going on within the Departments if it does not know the costings of the levels of services that are already in place? How does the Government know how much it has for new measures? It makes a complete mockery of the budget. Imagine if Sinn Féin presented a budget without the existing levels of service costed. What kind of economics is that? It is crazy and it permeates right through this budget.

This budget will be known as the budget where the election promises were put in the bin. People are not stupid. The people in Mayo and the west of Ireland are not stupid either. They know the Government promised childcare for €200 a month. That was not delivered yesterday. There was no mention of it whatsoever. What in the name of God did workers do to this Government? Workers have never worked so hard and struggled so much. The Government knows that. In all of the Government TDs’ constituency offices, they know how hard people are working and how much they are struggling to make ends meet with the cost of living. Despite this, the Government ignores them. If the Government was going to end the measures put in place last year, it should have at least built them in to make life easier for people, rather than more difficult, but that is what it has achieved with this budget. I do not know how the Government managed to take €10 billion and make life so much more difficult for the many people who are working so hard. This is one of the most unfair budgets I have ever seen, even going back to the austerity years.

When I walked out of the Houses yesterday I met a well-known activist in a wheelchair. A lot of the Ministers of State will know her and they have great respect for her. Out of curiosity, I asked her how the budget works out for her. With tears in her eyes, she said that she will be €1,400 worse off because there is no cost of disability payment. The Minister of State tells me there are millions of euro for disability services. How then can we leave someone in a wheelchair more than €1,400 worse off in a budget when we have a €10 billion surplus? I just cannot figure out how the Government managed to do that.

When we talk about housing, we see there is no further funding for social and affordable housing. It is so unambitious. There is no mention of the more than 16,000 people who are homeless. There is no increase in the rent credit, even though we know that rents have gone up hugely. I just do not know where this budget has been plucked from.

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