Rose Conway Walsh (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The budget will not end the crisis in health and housing. It will not provide for the end of water charges that are due in March 2017. It will not end the crisis in homelessness. It will not end the hardship being experienced by tenants or mortgage holders. It will not close the tax loopholes that the partners in government deny exist in the first place and that this country has lost billions of euro over. It will not address the decades of neglect in rural Ireland and in the west, in any sense of the word.

We have been told that we will get an increase in Leader funding but we have not been reminded that millions of euro have been cut from the current Leader programme. In Mayo alone as much as €9 million has been cut from the Leader programme so I am extremely interested in the size of the increase in Leader funding.

The budget will be wrapped up and sold to the Irish people on the basis that we are being responsible and fair because these are two words of choice at the moment.Obviously, Fine Gael, and especially Fianna Fáil, have been told to use these two wordsad nauseam. I am not sure whether they are getting this advice from their Tory advisers or Michael O'Leary these days and I find it-----