Paul Gavan (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State. Today is significant in the history of the State, to be fair, as we have just witnessed the first Fine Gael-Fianna Fáil coalition budget. It is a landmark moment in which the right-wing parties of this State finally come together in a formal coalition of neoliberal politics. The Minister of State is quite a legend in neoliberal politics and the trade union movement is always fascinated by his comments. It is good that Senator Ó Domhnaill is here as just two weeks ago he advocated the privatisation of all public bus services in the State. We can see a natural match between the two right-wing parties. They are two peas in a very right-wing pod, the Irish conservative party in all but name. Like their Tory brothers and sisters across the water, their priorities are the landlord class and the wealthy elite.

The political divide between left and right in this State has never been more salient than today. No longer will those two parties be able to hide behind the safety net of Civil War politics when they go before the electorate. From today, the politics of the State are very clear; it amounts to right-wing and conservative politics from Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael versus a left, progressive and republican alternative.

I understand Deputy Micheál Martin called Fine Gael a very right-wing party at the weekend but the media got the wrong end of the stick. Deputy Martin was not complaining about Fine Gael but rather he was eulogising them. That is why his party is supporting today's right-wing budget. One may sit down and play with figures, tinkering with the system here and there, but at the end of the day, the system under a Fine Gael or Fianna Fáil Government remains the same. It is unstable, prone to cycles of boom and bust and has a nasty tendency to produce ever-increasing levels of inequality in our society. The process collapsed eight years ago and Governments have spent the past eight years trying to fix it rather than debating how to change it. Today, the Government has again invested in the very same principles and broken system.

The facts are staring us in the face. According to research from the Think-tank for Action on Social Change, TASC, based on Government figures, 29% of our population live in deprivation, which is double the 2008 rate. Over a third of our children experience deprivation, which is double the 2007 rate, and 58% of lone parents suffer deprivation, which is again double the 2007 rate. I was touched by Senator Ó Domhnaill expressing concern for lone parents but he must have forgotten that his Government slashed payments for lone parents in its last term. Some 35,000 young people emigrated from this country last year, which is a higher number than we saw in 2010. We have 800 fewer hospital beds today than in 2008. Things are not getting better for many people and they are instead getting worse. It is pretty clear this has something to do with the economic choices the Government keeps betting on.

Currently, this State has the lowest levels of capital investment in the history of the State at just 2% of gross domestic product, GDP. Sinn Féin in its alternative budget committed to a major capital investment programme of €1.23 billion, delivering 7,000 new homes, building schools and hospitals, providing flood relief and improving our water infrastructure. Ireland currently has the lowest levels of the 28 countries in the European Union of both government expenditure and revenue as a percentage of GDP. It is currently 35.1%, which is lower than the 2015 level of 38.6%. I am amazed to hear people saying it is a great idea to bring our debt-to-GDP ratio back down to 45% when the EU requirement is only 60%. Such people are actively advocating a monetarist straitjacket for the next decade. We need to change how we view government investments and public expenditure. It is not a cost to the State but rather an investment on which one will see a return. Sinn Féin is committed to investing €630 million in health, €278 million in education, €252 million in child care and €503 million in social protection.

The child care proposals are, frankly, not good enough. We need universal provision and, as usual, Fine Gael had nothing to say about the wages of child care workers. There is nothing to address the issue in its proposal. The average pay in the sector is €10.26 and many workers are on the minimum wage. That has an impact on quality; how can we have quality child care when there is high turnover because people cannot afford to work in the sector? People get more money making sandwiches for lunch in Centra than working as a child care worker.