Lynn Ruane (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State to the Chamber. Budget 2023 comes at a time of great anxiety for many people across the country. The cost-of-living crisis has been extensively discussed already but I wish to give the context that, for many people, there has been a cost-of-living crisis for years, if not forever. During recessions and after recessions, during booms and after booms, before the Ukraine war and during it, people have experienced significant deprivation and poverty. Last year, my colleagues in the Civil Engagement Group and I described budget 2022 as a missed opportunity and called on the Government to use the suspension of EU fiscal rules and learn from the lessons of the Covid-19 pandemic and the vulnerability it exposed within our society to take transformative action. The opportunity was not taken and people are paying the price for those decisions today.

I will speak briefly on energy. We know that people are struggling with rising costs. While I welcome the €600 energy credit for households, it does not go far enough. We should be regulating and capping standing charges. We need to ensure that ordinary people are never again exposed to the volatility of fossil fuel markets. That means investing in renewable energy and scaling up retrofitting, including the retrofitting of social housing. This necessary action for people and the planet is missing from budget 2023.

We must ensure that we not only temporarily alleviate people's circumstances but look to addressing them in the long term with a vision for generations to come in terms of market income inequality, that is, income inequality before transfers are applied. Ireland has one of the highest rates in the EU in that regard. More than half a million people in this country are living in poverty. Civil society groups working on behalf of those living in poverty, including Social Justice Ireland and Barnardos, called for an increase in social welfare payments of €20 this year. The €12 increase announced is insufficient and the purchasing power of those payments will be lower in 2023 than it was at the start of 2022. Let me be clear that the decisions made in respect of social welfare payments are decisions on whether people will live and stay in poverty, whether single parents will be able to afford to feed their children, whether pensioners will be able to heat their homes and whether people with disabilities can afford the additional items they need to survive.

On disability, we know from the Indecon cost-of-disability report that households with disabled persons face additional annual costs of between €8,700 and €12,300 and that the bulk of these costs are not met by current supports. Although welcome, one-off measures such as the €500 lump sum payment for disability allowance recipients simply do not scratch the surface of what is needed to tackle the true cost of disability in the long term.

More broadly, I ask the Minister of State if, in devising proposals in respect of social welfare payments, the minimum essential standards of living developed by the Vincentian Partnership for Social Justice were utilised to inform the rates of payments. People need to live, not just survive.

On the issue of pensions, the recent announcement of the increase in the requirement to attain a full contributory State pension to a 40-year contribution rate is a deeply regressive and discriminatory step. It discriminates against those who engage in care work and, frankly, will simply be unattainable for many people. Women are already disproportionately under-represented among those claiming the full contributory State pension. According to the National Women's Council of Ireland, only 16% of those in receipt of the full pension are women. The increase in the contributory threshold will only save the State €400 million per year up to 2040, yet it continues to spend €2 billion every year on private pension tax relief - expenditure that the ESRI has described as regressive - while employer PRSI is among the lowest in Europe.

Staying with the issue of gender, and equality more broadly, in 2017 the Government made a commitment that gender and equality proofing would be utilised in the budgetary process. Last year, however, we saw that policies were not gender and equality proofed. I ask the Minister of State to provide information on how the measures in this budget have been subject to gender and equality proofing. Sometimes there can be a misunderstanding of gender proofing as it being the inclusion of measures in the budget that positively affect women. While some people may point to that, and I obviously welcome the moves in respect of IVF, budget equality proofing and gender proofing are also about how other aspects of the budget negatively affect and have consequences for women. They are not only about the positive things in the budget, but how other decisions negatively affect women, such as the decision in respect of the pension issues.

On housing, long-term solutions to the housing crisis are not coming forward in the budget. Although tax credits for renters may provide some relief, they will not solve the housing crisis in the long term. Earlier this year, the Seanad passed a motion proposed by my group that called on the Government to introduce progressive long-term solutions such as committing to the definancialisation of housing as a core principle of future housing policy, ending the State's over-reliance on the private market to address the shortcomings in housing, establishing a construction company owned and operated by the State and investing radically in the development of public homes on public land.Instead, we are seeing poor use of State money, including spending of more than €102 million between June 2021 and June 2022 on leasing for social housing. It is planned to spend an additional €98 million this year. The State should instead use that money to invest in the development of social housing to be owned by the State.

I welcome the announcement of a vacant homes tax, which I hope will see more homes coming back into active use. This was proposed in 2017 by our group and championed by our colleague, the former Senator Grace O’Sullivan, in the Derelict and Vacant Sites Bill 2017.

I welcome the provision in the budget for the creation of two new data commissioners. Along with other members of the Oireachtas joint committee, I called for this to be done. While I would have liked to have seen a greater increase in the moneys available to the commission to undertake the work, the creation of the two new commissioner posts is welcome.

The increase of €177 million in overseas development aid, ODA, is welcome, but we are still a long way from the €232 million increase required to put us on track to meet our commitment of 0.7% of GNI expenditure on ODA. I note that €75 million of this additional ODA funding is to be dedicated exclusively to the humanitarian response in Ukraine. While this is welcome, it means that just €100 million in new funding will be allocated to address the multiple other humanitarian crises around the globe, including the devastating flooding in Pakistan and the famine in the Horn of Africa.

On a related note, I ask if the budget includes scope for climate finance and, crucially, loss and damage payments for global south countries outside the existing ODA budget. This is extremely urgent. We know that tens of millions of people who have been displaced recently in Pakistan and in other countries that have done the least to cause the climate crisis need to begin receiving the reparations that are owed to them to survive.

I acknowledge that €1.1 billion has been announced in shock measures relating to small and medium-sized enterprises, SMEs. I appreciate that this may be more relevant to the next debate, to which Senators Black and Flynn will contribute. These one-off payments seem to be lumped together. A mixture of areas, including community and voluntary organisations, the Gaeltacht, sports, culture and the arts, are getting €60 million. Due to Covid-19 and the Ukrainian crisis, community and voluntary organisations, like people in other areas, have huge costs. However, some €1.1 billion is being allocated to SMEs. I am confused by the small allocation within this budget to an area that has six or seven different sectors within it. I ask for clarification on why they are being rammed together and just €60 million is being provided to them. Why is such a big investment being made in SMEs but not in the community and voluntary sector?