Kathryn Reilly (Sinn Fein)

It should be ashamed of the cost of living crisis it is imposing on the low and middle income families in this State.

We were also promised falling levels of unemployment but what has happened since the Government announced the Jobs initiative in May of this year? More than 5,000 additional people are looking for work, thousands more have emigrated, and last week we were told that an additional 22,000 people will become unemployed next year while 40,000 will emigrate.

For this Government, like the previous one, unemployment appears to be a price worth paying. As a result, many people will begin to wonder what planet this Minister is on. In each electoral division in the State 12 people are getting ready to emigrate. One in five young people are looking for work. Communities are seeing Garda stations, Army barracks and accident and emergency departments close. Families are seeing their living standards being squeezed, and not just this year but for the next four years under this Government.

As the Minister of State, Deputy Hayes, mentioned earlier, this budget was presented on the basis of three guiding principles: fairness, jobs and reform. We agree there was no easy way out of this crisis but there was a fair way, and the fair way would have been to introduce progressive taxation to tax wealth. It was not fair to cut disability payments to young people, cut the fuel allowance season, make third level education unaffordable for swathes of young people and increase VAT.

Senator Van Turnhout mentioned earlier that it was a budget of two halves, and I agree with that. It is a budget of the "haves" and "have nots". Reform would have been leading by example.