Thomas Byrne (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Will the Minister respond to the ESRI report? Thankfully, the ESRI has published a report on income distribution and the effects of the budget. The Government used to have such a report in the budgetary documents. It used to tell us who gained and who lost, but it stopped doing so this year because we would have gone to that page and immediately seen that every budget the Government has put forward has hit the poorest hardest. Its own figures show this so it has stopped publishing them. We now have the ESRI to thank for giving us the details.

The graph in the report shows the bottom 10% lose the most under the budget and the top 10% gain the most. The ESRI found the top 30% gain and the bottom 70% in the country lose under the budget. One difference between this and the previous Government is this would have been completely reversed. We did not like passing the budgets we did, and the Opposition bitterly opposed them at the time, but the top earners lost more than the bottom earners. The Government has done completely the opposite.

The Labour Party has completely abandoned all of its principles. Why support a Government which consistently hits the poorest in society the hardest?