Rose Conway Walsh (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I always listen with interest but what strikes me is that there is lots of confidence but there is still very little supply. The reason I say there is very little supply is that if one is earning €30,000 per annum, one will benefit by 10 cent a day extra or 75 cent per week. If one earns €40,000 per annum one will get a total sum of 58 cent per week in saving in income tax. That is why there is more confidence than supply.

There is a great deal of talk about sustainability and stability. We have a debt of more than €200 billion and we are facing a number of external factors, Brexit, the situation in Italy, the trade wars between America and China and other things that are on the horizon. We find €1 billion in the drawer and we are not quite sure where it comes from. That does not fill me, as an Irish citizen, with confidence. Will we lose €1 billion next week, as we happened to find €1 billion? It reminds me of the time when the Fianna Fáil Party enjoyed 15 years in Government and each year, because of stamp duty, we had an extra this and that, and no one seemed to know what was going on. Then it was all revealed. No one knew what was going on, except the bankers.

Fianna Fáil’s attempts to present this budget as containing good bits that they influenced and bad bits that are the fault of Fine Gael is pathetic. There are, however, areas of this budget where the Government is looking to repeat the mistakes of the past that were made by Fianna Fáil in Government. In this budget there was hardly any mention of the instability of relying on unpredictable and unsustainable corporate tax receipts. This strikes me very much as a budget for the wealthy and they must be delighted because, on first reading of the Budget Statement, they seem to go untouched. Landlords are rewarded with 100% mortgage relief, and the question is whether they are required to reward their tenants in any way. We are spending €120 million on this relief, which could build a great many social homes.

This budget will be known as the tweaking budget. The Minister for Finance, Deputy Donohoe, was keen to talk about this year’s unexpected €1 billion, yet there is no mention of the years ahead. What if those receipts are not matched next year? This reminded me of the American Senate subcommittee hearing on corporate taxation when the situation around taxation in this country was exposed. I think we owe John McCain a debt in terms of the pressure that was put on multinationals so that they realise more and more that there is no place for them to hide. Even though we have taken the Apple case to the Europe Court of Justice and we do not want to take the money involved, multinationals understand that the net is closing and that is why the additional €1 billion appeared out of nowhere.

This is a volatile model which is a deceptive way of funding the health system. It reminds me, as I said of the over-reliance on increasing receipts from stamp duty more than a decade ago. This budget offered the opportunity to set out a sustainable and credible funding path for health to address capacity issues, funding shortages, and produce a sustainable delivery plan for Sláintecare, but it appears that this will not happen in the near future.

Last week, we met the Irish Hospital Consultants Association and it is of the view that the Government has entirely failed the health system. Deputy Cowen spoke of the reopening of beds in hospitals and the restoration of home care hours, which were cut. I nearly fell off my seat at such neck on the part of a member of the Fianna Fáil Party saying that and genuinely looking for praise for restoring home help hours or reopening hospital beds, when in government it insisted on closing them, giving our money to the banks and nationalising the debt. Now the party wants praise because a few euro will be spent on opening hospital beds and restoring home care hours. One could not make it up. It is like a black comedy.

Fianna Fáil’s fingerprints can be seen in the increased spend on the National Treatment Purchase Fund, NTPF, which will not address the chronic lack of investment in staff and facilities. The NTPF channels money into the private healthcare system and leaves no incentive to invest in the public healthcare system. That is why I say this is the tweaking budget. It changes nothing in terms of the privatisation of services, between housing and the health service. We are still giving away more and more power and authority to the markets and to the private providers and we are not taking responsibility as a nation for the essential services that need to be delivered.

Earlier this year we welcomed the ratification of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.The Minister of State says that money has been allocated for disabilities but there is a big hole there. Are parents of children with autism and other disabilities going to get the services they need through this budget? Are they going to get the physiotherapy, for which they currently have to wait for months, or the occupational therapy and the education they need? Are we going to continue to siphon off the responsibility for young adults with autism, other mental health difficulties and challenging behaviour? That is what is happening at the moment. We are pawning off these people, the most vulnerable in society, to other agencies which are not able to deal with them.

Another winner from today's budget were the banks. Two of the banks will not pay a penny in corporation tax for the next 13 and 20 years, respectively. They effectively have a tax holiday, though they earned well over €2.6 billion last year. There is an increase in the betting tax, which will raise up to €52 million over a full year. Why was this not higher? I worked in the betting industry in London when betting tax was 10%. I have many other things to say which I will reserve for the Order of Business.

This is clearly an election budget. There is something in it to keep some people quiet until we get through the next election.