Nessa Cosgrove (Labour)

We in the Labour Party, like my colleague said, will definitely not be supporting this Bill. There was talk here about a strong economy but one in five children are still living in homelessness. After this budget, households across Ireland will be 2% worse off. The worst part of this is that one in five people are on low pay in Ireland. We are lauded as one of the richest countries in Europe but one in five are on low pay, and this has been going on for two decades. That figure is from the European Commission. The tax changes in this Bill do very little for ordinary families. We see that there were no targeted measures to reduce energy costs or the cost of living. The only positive change we can see in the personal tax code is the raising of the 2% ceiling on the USC on account of the 65 cent increase to the hourly rate of the national minimum wage, as was proposed by the Low Pay Commission. The Labour Party brought that in. The lack of indexation means that there is nothing but effective tax rises next year for ordinary workers. This paltry tax rise for ordinary workers was at the expense of the cut in VAT to 9% that was given out to fast food restaurants.

Senator McDowell referred to Sligo, and said nowhere is open until after 5 o'clock. I would argue that the reason for that is that people have no money in their pockets to spend before 5 o'clock and that people in the hospitality services are among the lowest paid workers in our economy. The tax cut to 9% is scandalous and it will not be passed on to workers or consumers. It is an expensive tax break for a sector that is already adding jobs and where more openings than closures are taking place. That has been researched right across the country. It is a bad policy and no one seems to agree with it besides the Tánaiste and the restaurant lobby. The Minister could have done what we in the Labour Party suggested and established a specialist body to support the industry to become sustainable and consider reforming and modernising the commercial rates system. We have been raising this for years. Instead, this pre-election promise to restaurant lobbyists leaves us with this bizarre policy change which will take hundreds of millions that we can ill afford out of the Exchequer.

The tax cut to 9% on apartments is the same. There is no evidence that this will increase housing supply and there are no conditions attached to it that developers have to build affordable housing if they are going to avail of this tax cut. There is no evidence that it will actually boost housing supply and there was nothing in the budget that gave us any hope about a radical reset in housing policy. We got this 9% VAT cut. It can never be justified. It was like a gift to developers and big lobbyist groups.

This is a big, sprawling Bill. We could talk more about it and there will be much more to say, but the flagship policy in this Bill - the 9% VAT rate for big property developers and the restaurant industry - is somewhere where the Government has gone wrong, and we will definitely not be supporting it.