Pauline Tully (Sinn Fein)

I want to raise a number of issues concerning yesterday's budget and the first issue concerns childcare. We know we have more then 40,000 children in need of a childcare place now. I regularly have parents on the phone to me or they come into my office crying because they cannot find a childcare place, particularly for young babies and children up to the age of two, which means they cannot return to work. The situation affects people across the board. The Government has proposed that there will be extensions to schools and community centres to address this. I really do not understand this proposal. How long will such work take? I ask because childcare places are urgently needed. We know of schools that require additional classrooms at the moment and they are being held up by the building section in the Department for months and maybe years. I am not sure about using community centres and the idea behind that. I can see the sense of combining schools with preschool education. There needs to be more collaboration and co-operation between those two sectors, but I do not feel the proposal will address what is a very urgent problem at the moment. I believe that expanding the building blocks scheme would have been much better for existing providers to allow them purchase existing buildings and renovate them. The scheme would also deal with the large degree of vacancy in many of towns, villages and communities.

On education, the programme for Government contains a commitment to reduce the pupil-teacher ratio. We have one of the highest pupil-teacher ratios in all of Europe yet this has not been addressed in this year's budget. There was talk about reducing the pupil-teacher ratio to 19:1. Many classrooms have more than 30 students which is not fair on teachers or students. It is particularly not fair on students who may have an additional need and are in mainstream and trying to keep up. It is increasingly difficult to do so in a large classroom setting. I know not all classes are the same and that class size depends on the number of students and their ages, but there needs to be an effort made across the board to reduce the ratio to benefit all of the school community.

On the school capitation grant, yes, there is a €50 increase for primary schools and a €20 increase for post-primary schools, but it is not sufficient and falls short of what is needed. There are increasing costs, years of underfunding in the sector, the cost-of-living package for schools is off the table and, increasingly, schools must go to the financial support services unit for assistance. Therefore, the budget allocation will not address the needs of schools and the chronic underfunding of schools.

I welcome having therapies provided in schools. That is the right way to go. I would love to have more detail on that and how quickly it will be rolled out because, again, that is an urgent need. We know that the CDNTs and the primary care sectors are not working at the moment because they do not have the staff to provide the services that children need to benefit in life and in school. Given children spend most of their day in the school setting, having therapies on site would be a really good idea. I have advocated for this for years, as the Minister of State, Deputy Moynihan, knows because we were on the disability committee together and we discussed this very often. Having therapies in school is the right way to go, but it is how quickly we can do that. Where are the therapists going to come from? They cannot be found to fill vacancies in the disabilities sector in the community. I will guarantee that people will perhaps prefer to work in a school environment than in those teams because, unfortunately, due to being understaffed, it makes those teams a very difficult place to work and many people are not opting to work in those. I want to see the proposal working.

We had statements on school transport last week and I know there is mention of increasing capacity by 100,000 by 2030. There was no increase this year and there is no increase for next year, by the looks of things. There were 173,000 students accommodated this year and 170,000 places were mentioned during the budget debate, so we are perhaps talking about a little less, but I presume the number is in or around the same, but there is no increased capacity. We really need to see that increased capacity to facilitate students to get to school and get them into the good habit of using buses and public transport.

I would love to hear more details about the DEIS+ plan. Will applications for DEIS be reopened? There are many schools that do not have DEIS status and it is very hard to understand why because their neighbouring school does and it is the same area and same profile. Such schools would welcome another opportunity to apply for DEIS status.

On disability, all of the main disability organisations have expressed their disappointment with the budget. All of them advocated for a cost-of-disability payment. That has not been provided. A sum of €10 per week is not sufficient to address the significant needs. The price of groceries and energy continues to rise. There are no one-off payments this year. Ms Joan Carthy from the Irish Wheelchair Association has indicated that people will be on average over €1,600 worse off this year because of this budget, and that is very concerning. I know there has been an increase in funding for services, and that is long overdue. Again, I would like to see the detail on that and how much of that will address increasing costs and wage increases. Not all disabled people avail of services so the provision will not benefit everybody in the disability community. Again, the detail is important to realise how much the provision will have an impact on people.I welcome the permanent reduction of €500 in the student contribution fee, but it is still less than last year's reduction of €1,000. That is still going to impact students who are finding it very difficult to cope because student accommodation is chronic at this stage. How much investment is going into student-specific accommodation in universities including our technological universities, which are crying out for student accommodation. They are very willing to provide it, but they do not have the funding to do so. They need to get the ability to borrow to do so.

There has been a reduction in the budget for the drugs task force from €11.6 million to €8.7 million. That is extremely disappointing. The funding increased last year to €11.6 million from approximately €8 million and it is really disappointing to see it slashed. It is lower now than it was 20 years ago. Sinn Féin has committed to providing €21.7 million in its alternative budget. We need to address this problem. There are people with chronic drug problems who want support and help to get away from drugs. It is having an impact on society. We need to invest in people and communities.

Like the disability area, the breakdown of funding for health is a little bit unclear. I presume it will become clearer. A total of 220 beds for next year is half what is needed. We need to invest more in hospitals and the beds that are required.

There does not seem to be clear funding for a number of strategies. I hope I am wrong about that. There is a national strategy for cancer, cardiovascular disease and stroke, and rare diseases. It would save money in the long term if money was put into these strategies and if a lot more work was done to create awareness and put preventative measures in place because people would not end up in hospital and they would be able to get the care they need.

Again, no funding seems to have been provided for women's health and endometriosis. Perhaps it has been; I hope it has been. I would like to see much more investment in that area and also for children's spinal health.

My final point is on the reduction of €500 million in rural development funding. That is very disappointing. It will adversely affect rural areas.