Gary Gannon (Dublin Central, Social Democrats)

There has been a lot of talk from the Government benches this week about economic stability and about protecting our competitiveness. The previous speaker just verified that. That is absolutely fair enough. However, I believe that this year the Government has chosen big corporations over people who need protection the most. If one wants to make an argument that multinationals are vital to the economy, which clearly they are, let us be consistent. Investing in people is every bit as economically transformative as investing in profits. A report a couple of years ago by the Society of St. Vincent de Paul calculated the cost of poverty to this State to be about €4 billion a year. If we really believe that strong companies make a strong country, surely a second tier of child benefit targeted at families living in poverty would deliver an economic and social return that far outweighs the tax breaks we have seen from the Government. The difference is that those dividends would not show up in the balance sheets of Burger King or McDonald's, they would show up in a vulnerable child finally getting support from a proper State safety net or in carers being valued for the essential work they do every single day.

I agree having some positivity is important. We have seen some proper investment, for example in the League of Ireland academy system. That is good. The expansion of the basic income for the arts actually provides a net of security for a cohort of people who put a lot into the economy. I give credit where it is due. When a State actually sees something that can be transformative there are times when we can do that. For me however, it is about how do we not see the whole picture, because right now Ireland, in all our constituencies, is at a crisis point. You can feel it when walking down the streets of this city. We heard it today during the Oireachtas committee on drug use when we had groups in from Epic, Empowering People in Care. Social workers attended who work in special care units and are being left to manage children detoxing off drugs because the addiction and mental health infrastructure simply is not there. I recognise the fact we are also celebrating World Mental health Day today. That is not what the service was designed for, and it is certainly not what those young people deserve.

Yet, when you open budget 2026 you see the same failed logic being baked into a system again. The prison service allocation for the next year is €579 million. The Government is literally building its way deeper into imprisonment in a country where seven out of ten people who go to prison will reoffend within three years. Meanwhile, the probation service, one of the few services that actually helps people to get out of prison, gets an increase of just €6.7 million. Youth justice gets €7.3 million. That is less than 3% of what is being spent on expanding cells. At the Dóchas Centre last night, 27 women slept on mattresses on the floor. Government Ministers are talking about the expansion of prison services when women were sleeping on the floor just last night. That prison is running at 140% capacity. What does this budget do? It funds 26 extra beds. Expanding cell spaces does not solve overcrowding. It just gives us more space to repeat the same failures. Even with the spaces, we are being told our prison population is currently operating at about 118% over capacity. Even with the type of investment in this budget and what the Minister, Deputy O'Callaghan, aims to reach, that actually only brings it down to 104% overcapacity. That is mental as logic. If we invested even half of that money into prevention, housing and rehabilitation we would not need more cells at all. One would think that the Minister for justice, of all people, a man who spent a lifetime listening to and presenting evidence, would know better than to ignore it when applying it to his legislation. This is not just about justice spending. It is about the choices that reveal a Government's values: a Government that can fund hundreds of million for new prison spaces but cannot find the courage to fund early intervention programmes for young people at risk; a Government that celebrates corporate windfalls but ignores the social collapse happening in plain sight in our capital city. There is almost nothing in this budget that deals with early intervention, nothing that breaks the cycle of poverty, trauma and addiction that keeps communities trapped. Instead, we keep chasing the symptoms and not the causes. If that continues, I am absolutely certain we will be back here next year debating the same problems, and the year after that and the one after that. We will see more young people criminalised effectively for being poor, more families without homes, more women sleeping on prison floors and more Ministers congratulating themselves on a responsible budget. It makes no sense, it is not responsible and it is not inevitable. These are political choices. The evidence is there. Experts have consistently told us what will work but year after year the Government ignores it because the real investment, the kind that changes lives rather than headlines, cannot be measured in quarterly returns. We cannot keep doing this. We cannot keep repeating the same cycles of neglect and then acting surprised when they lead to the same forms of social breakdown that are often lamented from the centre-right quarters of this Chamber.

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