Marc MacSharry (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Notwithstanding the Minister for Health's regular trips to the House, I request that he be asked to come here once more to deal with the health service budget. He was here last evening but we did not have time to discuss the budget as each of us only had a short time allocated to deal specifically with the new children's hospital. We heard confirmation in recent days of a deficit of ¤400 million in the HSE, that there will be no supplementary budget in this regard and that the deficit will be carried over into next year. That will clearly impact on front-line services. We can see this already. I spoke last week - Senator Darragh O'Brien spoke yesterday - on the issue of cuts to the home help service where some ¤8 million is expected to be saved. The impact that is having is far greater than the amount of savings that can be made.

In terms of this morning's news items, the ESRI has produced a report which shows the rebalancing required in terms of pension tax reliefs could raise up to ¤400 million alone. Clearly, we are not focusing on the areas on which we need to focus. We are not protecting the most vulnerable. We were not focusing on those can take a little bit more pain. On the pensions side, there are people on salaries ten times more than the average wage with pension contributions of up to 36 times more than those. While we do not want to remove all incentives it is important that people make arrangements for their future and retirement in order that they are not a burden on the State. Clearly, all people are equal but some are a lot more equal than others in the context of the incentives we provide in terms of tax relief to certain people at a time when basic needs in communities are raped and pillaged. I say this in the context of an ¤8 million saving proposed in cuts to the home help service.