Mark Ward (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein)

The Government has broken its promises to carers. In the general election, the Government promised to abolish the means tests for carers. This was another broken promise. In this budget, so little money has been allocated that at this rate of investment it would take 30 years under Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and, in the case of the Minister of State, Independents, to abolish the means tests. This is a horrible betrayal of carers. Carers in my constituency tell me they do not even bother to apply for the carers allowance because they know they are going to be over the threshold. I said it before and I will say again: I think this is a direct plan by the Government because it does not want people to apply for the carers allowance. There are other carers in my area who either will not go back to work because they are afraid to go over the threshold or they will not take a promotion in work. This is creating a glass ceiling for carers who give so much back to our society. Sinn Féin will continue to fight for carers and to put the Government to the cosh so that every carer gets the recognition and respect they deserve. Sinn Féin simply does not break its promises.

The budget announced last week condemns people with disabilities and households to poverty. This is a fact. It is not only us saying it because other agencies have come out and supported this statement. The Government has actually shown its true colours. There was all that expert policy advice and the Government still chose to cut the cost of disability supports to the value of €1,000 for a person with a disability. On top of this, the Government has decided it is not worthwhile to keep the real value of the disability allowance in line with inflation. The prices for people with disabilities go up as they do for the rest of us. When the cost of milk, bread or petrol goes up, it goes up for people with disabilities as well. Yet they are being subjected to more cutbacks than anybody else. This was a budget about choices. The Government had a choice about who it looked after and what it did. What did it do? It decided to bail out people who have already built apartments. They are getting a big cash intake, rather than people with disabilities being looked after. The Government should be looking after the ordinary people, but it made its choice and it left people with disabilities behind.

On Monday, I had the pleasure of meeting a lovely young lady called Rebecca Nolan. She is a very impressive young woman who I have known for some time. If I had an ounce of her energy, I would be absolutely flying. Rebecca is a wheelchair user advocate for the Stewarts Care's service in the Rossecourt Resource Centre. She decided to bring me out on a walk around Balgaddy and Rossecourt. She showed me some of the difficulties she had getting from A to B. As an able-bodied man, she brought me back down to earth as quickly as possible when I saw some of the obstacles she had getting in her way. Some of the obstacles were things I and everybody here would take for granted, such as simply stepping up on a footpath. As a wheelchair user, if that path is not dished, she will not be able to do that. I have committed to working with her with South Dublin County Council to get all these issues resolved in the local area. When I go to South Dublin County Council, and this is where the budget comes in, it will tell me that because of successive cutbacks to local authorities it does not have the funds to go out and dish those paths and make them more wheelchair accessible the way they did in the past. This is another implication of the cutbacks in budgets to local authorities.

Communities right across Dublin and the State are vulnerable and exposed to crime. We have far too few gardaí to prevent crime. The Minister for justice was congratulating himself again this year regarding the budget to recruit 1,000 gardaí. This is the minimum of what is needed. This funding is irrelevant, though, if the Minister is unable to recruit the gardaí. I am on the justice committee, and my estimate is that by the end of this year the Minister will probably have about 600 to 700 new gardaí recruited, so we are already behind. We are never going to get up to that 5,000 target he said is needed. In fact, in the first seven months of this year, Garda numbers have only increased by 63, and this is taking into account the number of people who have retired or left the force in the last while.

In my area of Dublin Mid-West, we have fewer community gardaí than we had five years ago. For example, Ronanstown Garda station has 38% fewer gardaí compared to 2020. Clondalkin Garda station has seen a reduction of 30% in the same period. This is an area where there has been a huge population increase. We have Clonburris going up in the middle of Clondalkin, with an estimated growth in population of up to 22,500 people over the next ten years. It is currently being built, and people are living there, yet we are seeing a reduction in the number of gardaí in the area. People in my area contact me regularly to say they are calling the Garda, but with all the will in the world, if there are not enough gardaí there to answer the phones or to come out in the car and drop in to people to see what the issue is, then people are left home alone and frightened. At the moment, especially in and around Dublin, the run-up to Halloween is always a really frightening time for people. This is especially the case for vulnerable people, people living alone, people with kids and especially people with kids who may be on the spectrum and have sensitivities to noise and fireworks.

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