Jack Chambers (Dublin West, Fianna Fail)
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A Cheann Comhairle, is onóir dom é buiséad 2025 a thíolacadh, buiséad deireanach théarma an Rialtais seo, don Teach seo inniu in éineacht le mo chomhghleacaí, an tAire, an Teachta Donohoe.

INTRODUCTION

When this Government took office in June 2020, we were still dealing with Brexit and in the midst of a global pandemic that was having an unprecedented impact on our society and economy. The effect on families, businesses and our way of living was devastating. While only emerging from that pandemic, we were then confronted with the war in Ukraine and the cost-of-living pressures.

This Government, through successive budgets, has supported the individuals, families and businesses who have played an integral part in ensuring our economy is in such a strong position today. Government responded as it should have with a unity of purpose and provided extraordinary supports to deal with all the challenges we faced. The outcomes and the progress made were not inevitable. It is as a result of the drive and focus of this Government to provide a better future for everyone and in the careful management of our public finances. I believe budget 2025 puts in place the policies and measures to continue this positive trajectory and ensure that all our people see a promising and hopeful future in this country.

Today’s budget is my first and it is also unique in the opportunity it presents to plan, transform and deliver for the future. That future is not just about next month, next year or the next decade, it is about ensuring that the children born today in Ireland and every day from here on can live prosperous and fulfilled lives. They will enjoy better healthcare, live longer, have better education, more housing and significant infrastructure improvements as a result of the decisions made today. However, we also need to give hope to young people now and to their families, their parents and grandparents whether living here in Ireland or abroad that the decisions being made today will help them afford a home of their own and live a life here in Ireland achieving their full potential. Budget 2025 puts the country on a firm footing for the future.

Progressivity, fairness and catalysing real opportunity for the future have been at the core of this Government’s budgets and these principles have been central to how budget 2025 has been designed. Strengthening communities, building prosperity, tackling the cost-of-living challenges and enhancing living standards are all key components to build a better State that can make a real difference for the people of Ireland. We want our country to be an attractive place to live in, work in, raise a family, and create jobs and opportunity - a foundation of real progress for the future.

INFRASTRUCTURE AND INVESTMENT

Our ability to deliver for current and future generations is dependent on careful and prudent management of the State’s resources. The recent judgment from the Court of Justice of the European Union has provided the State with one-off revenue that has the capacity to be transformational. We know that the future economic performance of the State will depend on how the public infrastructure programme is prioritised and delivered over the next decade. It is imperative that this revenue is not used for day-to-day expenditure or to narrow the tax base. There should be a clear strategic direction in how it can be used to deliver for the future of our country, improving the lives of people and communities, and supporting our small and medium enterprises and multinational corporations.

Today, I will outline a framework that will set out the principles and directions on how this revenue should be allocated in a manner that will maximise its return. It is the Government’s view that we should utilise these revenues to address the known challenges that we face in housing, energy, water and transport infrastructure. Our economic, enterprise and industrial model is central to future progress. It has transformed our country from where we were 100 years ago. We must protect it. We must nurture it. We must continue to advance this model as a catalyst to support the transformation of our country, ensuring opportunities for the future. We will invest in a future that ensures Ireland is a country and a society that is fair, equitable and a beacon of hope, prosperity and progress.

We are in a global environment where competition for attracting foreign investment is intensifying. Infrastructure is a fundamental component of Ireland’s competitiveness, and is vital to businesses, large and small, and to attracting new foreign direct investment into the State. Maintaining our competitiveness and having the means to improve it are vital to maintaining employment in all sectors of our economy, no matter where those jobs are located.

The framework for allocation of the windfall receipts should be based on a number of high-level principles and parameters, but the guiding principle must be to benefit all citizens by supporting our future economic development.

The development of the framework will help ensure the maximum rate of return, both from an economic and societal perspective, from this once-off resource which can further complement the national development plan.

The Departments of Finance, and Public Expenditure, NDP Delivery and Reform, will build out this framework, with input from other relevant Departments and agencies. This will focus on the expected considerations for public investment in key infrastructure, including: deliverability; value for money; additionality; and prioritisation for economic impact. That work will begin now, with the target to bring the framework to Government for approval in the first quarter of next year.

The recent disposal of part of the State’s shareholding in AIB has presented us with an immediate opportunity to allocate additional funding towards capital spending over the coming years. To this end, today, I am making available €3 billion for infrastructure spending. This will help build on current progress, eliminating key infrastructural bottlenecks more rapidly, and help lay the foundations for further improvements in living standards and competitiveness. Deciding on the use of these resources requires prioritisation and it is important that their use results in tangible outputs.

I recognise that there are substantial needs in housing, but also in water and energy infrastructure that need to be addressed. Investment in these areas will allow us to meet the current and future needs of our country. To that end, I intend that these resources will be ring-fenced and drawn down when the funding is required and the necessary arrangements are in place to use it.

Water Infrastructure

In terms of addressing water infrastructure, €1 billion will be provided to Irish Water for non-domestic capital investment. This will allow for works to be carried out across the country on capital projects related to remedial action lists, connections for new housing and addressing urban wastewater pressures.

HOUSING

This Government has invested unprecedented levels into housing delivery and it is our priority to continue to accelerate the supply of new homes. To support this, a further allocation of €1.25 billion will be made available to the Land Development Agency, LDA. This will bring the total amount of funding now available to the agency to €6.25 billion to deliver thousands of more affordable homes. The LDA will be tasked with deploying this capital in a way that can continue to drive the delivery of social and affordable homes.

ELECTRICITY GRID INFRASTRUCTURE

Confidence in our ability to provide a secure, stable and green energy infrastructure is important to position Ireland for future economic development and investment. To address this, I am also providing €750 million to facilitate an initial, direct equity injection to support capital spending on the further development of our electricity grid infrastructure. The upgrading of this key element of our national infrastructure will be instrumental in ensuring our economy is ready for the next phase of its development. Providing a secure, sustainable source of energy will encourage further industrial investment, facilitate the progression of the digital economy, enable decarbonisation and enhance our competitiveness. The upgrading of the national electricity grid will require capital investment in both the onshore and offshore grid. I believe the signalling of the provision of this funding to expand the capacity of our electricity grid will have a positive impact on future investment decisions currently being considered by both indigenous and multinational companies.

In the event of further AIB share sales, I will seek to provide further funding to these critical infrastructure areas of water, housing and the electricity grid to underpin our future economic development. With this level of investment in the future, it is important to reflect on where we have come from. In the century since independence, Ireland has grown more tolerant, more diverse, more prosperous, more equal and more influential around the world. We need to keep building prosperity for the future. The measure of our success is how we treat people, how we turn the tide of our economic success into a force that lifts everyone, especially those who need our help the most. We can appreciate our achievement as a country more because of the generations at home who have had to struggle for it but we should not forget the people who struggle still. It is our responsibility to help because we can and we will.

MACROECONOMIC OUTLOOK

I will now provide an update on the macroeconomic outlook. I am pleased to report that our economy, on aggregate, is in relatively good shape. Over the past year or so, inflationary pressures have eased considerably, our domestic economy has grown at a robust pace and we continue to experience record high levels of employment. Indeed, our economy has now been operating close to, if not at, full employment since the end of the pandemic. Almost three quarters of our working-age population are now in employment, with participation among female workers at its highest level ever. This is a truly remarkable achievement and one we should properly recognise.

The rate of inflation, which was close to 10% just two years ago, has eased significantly this year. Inflation has been at or below 2% since March. This easing comes as welcome relief to households throughout the country who have dealt with everyday financial struggles due to rising prices over the past two years. Even as the headline rate of inflation has declined, I am acutely aware that many are still struggling as price levels throughout the economy remain elevated. That is why budget 2025 includes a cost-of-living package designed to support the most vulnerable and ease the financial burden over the winter months.

It is clear that supply is the main constraint on growth at present. That is why it is imperative that we can continue to narrow the infrastructure gap and improve the productive capacity of the economy. The Government recognises the need to invest in our future and support our competitiveness in the years to come. As part of budget 2025, we are investing at scale to address these bottlenecks and put in place long-term solutions to ensure a more sustainable, productive and resilient economy.

Budget 2025 is taking place against a backdrop of escalating international conflict and geopolitical instability. Our experience over the last number of years has shown that we are now clearly living in a more shock prone world. As a small, open and highly globalised economy, a deterioration in the international economy would, of course, have immediate knock-on consequences for the Irish economy. While we cannot prevent external shocks, we can ensure that we are on the best possible footing to respond when they occur. Within this context, budget 2025 has been designed to strike the right balance between ensuring families, workers and businesses have the supports they need today while also investing in our public services and infrastructure to prepare us for the challenges into the future.

While external risks remain elevated, the short-term prospects for the domestic economy are encouraging. The period of elevated price pressures has passed and inflation has now returned to a more stable trajectory. This easing in inflation, which is projected to remain below 2% both this year and next, will allow for an improvement in real wages and help support growth in consumer spending.

Overall, my Department is projecting modified domestic demand, a proxy for the domestic economy, to grow by 2.5% this year and by close to 3% next year. The strong growth in the domestic economy is expected to continue to pay dividends in the labour market. Indeed, the level of employment is set to increase by almost 110,000 in the two-year period to the end of 2025 and the unemployment rate is projected to remain low at around 4.5%. My Department’s macroeconomic forecasts have been endorsed by the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council.

FISCAL OUTLOOK

As outlined, the Irish economy is very strong on a headline level. However, there are real vulnerabilities in our public finances and these must be kept in mind when constructing a budgetary package. We know that our public finances are heavily reliant on corporation tax, much of which is windfall in nature and not linked to our domestic economy. Many of our income tax receipts are linked with this highly concentrated revenue stream. As I have said many times before, we must not use these potentially transient receipts to fund permanent expenditure measures.

At this stage, we are all familiar with the structural challenges we have already started to face, namely, an ageing population, the climate and digital transitions and deglobalisation. We know that we are facing substantial costs on all of these fronts, not to mind the unknown challenges ahead. We must ensure that the budgetary decisions we make today continue to place us in a better position to deal with these issues.

This year, my Department forecasts tax revenue will amount to €105.7 billion, an increase of €13.6 billion on our spring forecast, mostly attributable to corporation tax receipts and the revenue from the Court of Justice of the European Union judgment.

Following the enactment of the Future Ireland Fund and Infrastructure, Climate and Nature Fund Act earlier this year, on July 30, I signed the commencement order to officially establish both funds. They are a critical part of ensuring that future generations are not left to deal with the known challenges facing us. They allow us, at a time when we are recording headline surpluses, to plan for the future while still being in a position to react and provide for those who most need our assistance, to continue to invest in improving public infrastructure and good public services and to continue to support our businesses. In September, €4.3 billion was transferred into the Future Ireland Fund and €2 billion into the Infrastructure, Climate and Nature Fund. A further €4.1 billion will be transferred to the Future Ireland Fund this year. Transfers to both funds next year totalling €6 billion will mean by the end of next year, more than €16 billion will have been transferred to the funds.

I can inform the House that we are projecting a general Government surplus of €23.7 billion, or 7.5% of national income, this year and €9.7 billion, or 2.9%, next year. When windfall taxes and the one-off revenue from the Court of Justice of the European Union judgment are excluded, an underlying general government deficit of €6.3 billion is projected for 2024 and an underlying general government deficit of €5.7 billion is projected for 2025.

Our debt ratio is moving in the right direction. When this Government took office in 2020 our general government debt stood at close to 110% of national income. My Department projects that this ratio will be 69% of national income this year and will decline to 56% of national income by the end of the decade.

BUDGETARY STRATEGY

The Government decided in the summer economic statement to provide a budgetary package of €8.3 billion for budget 2025, which is consistent with expenditure growth of 6.9% and will accommodate higher capital spending and provide for additional public services against the backdrop of a higher population. Budget 2025 consists of a net tax package of €1.4 billion and an expenditure package of €6.9 billion.

I am also announcing today a cost-of-living package of €2.2 billion, which brings the total package for budget 2025 to €10.5 billion.

BUDGET 2024 MEASURES

INCOME TAX

As I have previously stated, the focus of the personal income tax package in this budget is to support low- and middle-income earners by building on the progress already made during this Government’s term, specifically with regard to increases to tax credits and USC reductions. Therefore, today I am announcing a personal income tax package of €1.6 billion. I am increasing the main tax credits, that is, the personal, employee and earned income credits, by €125. I am increasing the standard rate cut-off point by €2,000 to €44,000, with proportionate increases for married couples and civil partners. Turning to the USC, I am reducing the 4% rate to 3%. This represents the second consecutive reduction to this rate.

Following Government approval this morning, as of 1 January 2025, the national minimum wage will increase by 80 cent per hour to €13.50 per hour. Accordingly, to continue to ensure that these valued workers remain outside the higher rates of USC, I will be further increasing the entry threshold to the new 3% rate by €1,622 to €27,382, in line with the increase to the national minimum wage. This means that a full-time worker on the minimum wage will see an increase in his or her net take-home pay of approximately €1,424 on an annual basis. As a result of the cumulative increases to the main tax credits, a single person earning €20,000 or less in 2025 will now be outside of the income tax net.

Carers play a fundamental role in our society, and the Government is committed to supporting individuals and families with caring responsibilities. It is also a priority to further contribute to the whole-of-government approach to tackling child poverty. Therefore, I am increasing the home carer tax credit by €150; the single person child carer credit by €150; the incapacitated child tax credit by €300; and the dependent relative tax credit by €60. Separately, the blind tax credit will be increased by €300, which is the first increase to this credit in many years.

The income tax and USC enhancements I have announced today will provide a real benefit to taxpayers across all income levels. Of course, the various cost-of-living measures that will be announced shortly by the Minister, Deputy Donohoe, will provide further benefits. One of key objectives for this Government was to ensure that workers did not find themselves in a position where they pay more income tax solely because of wage growth as their incomes rise. Taking account of the cumulative personal income tax changes over the lifetime of this Government, the main tax credits have now been increased by 21% or €350 each from €1,650 to €2,000.

The standard rate cut-off point for a single person has been increased by 25% or €8,700 from €35,300 to €44,000, with commensurate increases for persons who are married or in a civil partnership. The USC middle rate has now been reduced by 1.5 percentage points from 4.5% to 3%. The 2% USC ceiling band has now been increased by 34% or €6,898 from €20,484 to €27,382.

CAPITAL ACQUISITIONS TAX (CAT)

The capital acquisition thresholds, which apply to gifts and inheritances, were last increased in 2019 and I now intend to provide further increases to all thresholds. I believe this is appropriate given the increases in property values in the intervening period. I am increasing the group A threshold from €335,000 to €400,000, the group B threshold from €32,500 to €40,000 and the group C threshold from €16,250 to €20,000.

SMALL BENEFIT EXEMPTION

The small benefit exemption allows an employer to provide limited non-cash benefits or rewards to their workers without the payment of income tax, PRSI and USC.

I am increasing the annual limit provided for in the exemption from €1,000 to €1,500 and will also permit five non-cash benefits to be granted by an employer in a single year under this exemption. This change will allow for greater flexibility to employers in giving non-tax rewards to their employees. This means that workers may receive up to three additional tax-free rewards or gifts, for instance, to reward exceptional performance or mark significant life events.

CERVICALCHECK PAYMENTS

I am introducing an exemption from income tax, capital gains tax and capital acquisitions tax on payments made to the women impacted by the failures in the CervicalCheck national screening programme. Future and historic income or gains arising to these women from the investment of CervicalCheck payments will also be exempt from the relevant taxes. These exemptions are a further element of the State’s response to the failures of the CervicalCheck screening programme.

EXTENSION OF SEAGOING NAVAL PERSONNEL TAX CREDIT

The Naval Service plays a critical role in safeguarding our nation’s security. To complement the wider suite of recruitment and retention initiatives under way and to acknowledge the exceptional hardships borne by our naval personnel at sea, I am extending the seagoing naval personnel tax credit for five years, to the end of 2029.

BENEFIT IN KIND - MOTOR VEHICLES

With regard to the benefit-in-kind, BIK, regime for company cars, I am extending for a further year the temporary universal relief of €10,000 to the original market value, which was first introduced in 2023. An employee with an electric company vehicle will have an overall BIK relief of €45,000 in 2025, which comprises of the €35,000 electric vehicle specific relief, which is already in legislation, plus the additional temporary universal relief of €10,000. I am also providing for a BIK exemption for the provision of electric vehicle chargers at the home of a director or employee.

RENT TAX CREDIT

In budget 2023, this Government introduced the rent tax credit, which has played a valuable role in providing financial support to renters right across the country. Today, I am increasing the value of the rent tax credit by €250, bringing it to €1,000 and €2,000 for a jointly assessed couple for 2025. In addition, in recognition of the cost-of-living pressures facing many renters right now, I am also increasing the credit for 2024 to €1,000 and €2,000 for a jointly assessed couple.

HELP TO BUY – EXTENSION

Ensuring people have access to homeownership is a key priority for this Government. Since its introduction, the help-to-buy scheme has supported just over 50,000 individuals or couples buy their own homes. To give further certainty to future homebuyers and to the market, I am extending the scheme-----

Deputies:

Hear, hear.

Jack Chambers (Dublin West, Fianna Fail)
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-----until the end of 2029.

PRE-LETTING EXPENSES EXTENSION

To continue to help owners of vacant property to bring that accommodation into the rental system, increasing the overall supply of rental accommodation, I am extending the relief for pre-letting expenses for landlords. This means that the relief will continue for a further three years to the end of 2027 in support of Housing for All.

REDUCED VAT RATE OF 9% FOR GAS AND ELECTRICITY

To continue supporting households and businesses as part of the Government’s cost-of-living package, I am proposing to extend the 9% reduced VAT rate for gas and electricity for another six months to 30 April 2025.

Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú)
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It is still the highest in western Europe.

Jack Chambers (Dublin West, Fianna Fail)
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I will introduce a financial resolution on this matter later this evening.

MORTGAGE INTEREST RELIEF

Mortgage interest tax relief was announced in last year’s budget and provided relief for mortgage holders who experienced increased interest rates in 2023 over 2022. In light of the impact high interest rates continue to have on households, I am extending this relief for one further year. This extension means that the relief will also be made available to assist mortgage holders in respect of the increase in interest paid in 2024 over 2022.

MEASURES TO SUPPORT BUSINESSES

Businesses both large and small are the lifeblood of our economy, and this Government is committed to supporting businesses so they can continue to grow, innovate and create employment.

REDUCING COMPLEXITY AND BOOSTING IRELAND'S ATTRACTIVENESS

International developments and commitments have seen significant complexity added to the corporation tax code in recent years and in budget 2025, I am pleased to take an important step towards reducing this burden through the introduction of a participation exemption for foreign dividends. This measure, which will come into effect from 1 January next, will provide an alternative, much simplified mechanism for double tax relief for multinational businesses. Work will continue in the coming year on participation exemptions, including further consideration of geographic scope and of a foreign branch exemption.

It is critical that we continue to actively work on maintaining Ireland’s attractiveness to businesses. The review of the tax treatment of interest, in respect of which a public consultation was launched last Friday, will seek to further reduce complexity in our tax code.

We must also support innovative businesses as they evolve to meet the challenges and seize the opportunities, of an increasingly digitalised world. This will be a focus of my Department’s review of the research and development tax credit, which will be undertaken over the coming year.

In the interim, to demonstrate this Government’s continuing commitment to innovative enterprises, I am providing for an increase in the first year payment threshold in the R and D tax credit from €50,000 to €75,000 to provide further cash flow support to those companies undertaking smaller R and D projects or engaging with the credit for the first time.

SUPPORTING SMALL AND MEDIUM ENTERPRISES

Startup and scaling businesses are the backbone of this country, providing significant employment across the country, with the potential to become the market leaders of tomorrow. It has been a long-standing commitment of this Government to support and promote these businesses, including by helping them to attract funding through incentives such as the employment investment incentive, the startup relief for entrepreneurs and the startup capital incentive.

My Department has recently completed a review of these schemes, which I have published today, and I am pleased to announce that I am extending all three schemes for a further two years to the end of 2026. I am also doubling the amount an investor can claim relief on under the employment investment incentive from €500,000 up to €1 million and increasing the relief available under the startup relief for entrepreneurs from €700,000 to €980,000.

Linked to this, and in recognition of the Government’s commitment to cultivating a thriving business angel investment ecosystem in Ireland, I am amending the capital gains tax relief targeted at investors in innovative startups to provide for an increased lifetime limit on gains to which the relief applies from €3 million to €10 million. This relief, which was announced last year, will commence shortly.

In addition, to support new startup companies, I am enhancing the section 486C small company startup relief from corporation tax by introducing a new method for companies to qualify for the relief by reference to class S PRSI, thereby extending the scope of the relief to small owner-managed startup companies.

For businesses scaling up, I am introducing a new relief for expenses incurred in connection with a first listing on an Irish or European stock exchange, subject to a cap of €1 million. To further support Irish businesses to grow and scale, in the coming year my Department will, subject to state aid considerations, introduce a stamp duty exemption. This measure would enable Irish SMEs to access equity via financial trading platforms designed to support their funding needs.

VAT REGISTRATION THRESHOLD

As a further measure to support small business, I have decided to raise the VAT registration thresholds that apply for the supply of goods and services, which are currently €80,000 and €40,000, respectively, to €85,000 and €42,500, respectively.

RETIREMENT RELIEF

Retirement relief supports the intergenerational transfer of businesses and farms and works to ensure their smooth transition so that they continue to play their important role in the Irish economy. Two changes will come into effect from 1 January 2025. I will retain the extension of the upper age limit for the relief from 65 years until the age of 70 to reflect current work practices. I am also providing that where there are disposals by the child or children above €10 million within 12 years of receiving the assets, a clawback of the relief will apply. Therefore, where the child or children retain the assets for more than 12 years, the CGT will be fully abated. This will support the growth and scaling of the family-owned businesses that are so important to our communities across our country.

SECTION 481 RELIEF

Turning now to the audiovisual sector, it is a source of great pride for Ireland that we have an international reputation as a centre of excellence for screen production, with a vibrant creative culture. This Government has shown significant ambition in recent budgets in supporting the sector to capitalise on its recent successes.

In order to maintain momentum and expand the breadth of the Irish industry, I am today announcing the introduction of a new tax credit for unscripted production, subject to European Commission approval. This credit will be available at a rate of 20% on qualifying expenditure of up to €15 million and, similar to the other audiovisual reliefs, projects will be required to pass a cultural test.

In addition, in response to specific challenges being faced by smaller feature film projects in bringing their stories to the screen, I am introducing a new 8% uplift under the section 481 film tax credit, again subject to state aid approval. This will apply to feature film productions with a maximum qualifying expenditure of €20 million. Further details of these two new supports will be set out in the Finance Bill next week.

I am also conscious of the importance of the visual effects sector within our wider audiovisual offering in Ireland. I have instructed my officials to monitor trends in the sector internationally over the coming year with a view to providing options for introducing a sector-specific measure as part of budget 2026, if appropriate.

Finally, recognising the important role that share-based remuneration plays in rewarding and retaining employees, which in turn helps businesses to thrive and grow, my Department commissioned an independent review of share-based remuneration this year. The report arising from that review has been published today and contains a number of recommendations, which I will consider in due course.

FARMING

Agriculture and the agrifood sector are of vital importance in our economy. This sector is embedded in our communities and wider society. Irish farmers play an important role in providing high-quality food domestically and for export and are highly regarded for quality produce and farming methods.

EXTENSION OF AGRICULTURAL STOCK RELIEFS

A number of important agricultural tax reliefs are due to expire at the end of this year. I can confirm the extension of the following reliefs to the end of 2027: general stock relief, stock relief for young trained farmers and stock relief for registered farm partnerships. I am also broadening the scope of accelerated capital allowances for farm safety equipment by adding further qualifying farm safety equipment types that can benefit from the relief.

INCOME STABILITY (FARMING/DAIRY)

I am aware that there can be income instability in the farming sector in general and the dairy sector more specifically. I am keen to advance an income volatility measure to support the farming sector for consideration in advance of next year’s budget. This requires detailed consideration of complex issues of policy around how this would operate in the context of financial regulation, governance and legal structures. My officials will work with the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine in progressing proposals for consideration.

AGRICULTURAL STAMP DUTY RELIEFS

How farmers organise their farm business has been changing in recent years, and to reflect modern developments in the agriculture sector, I am amending both the young trained farmer stamp duty relief and the stamp duty relief which applies to farmers who lease land. The relief for young trained farmers will be revised so that it will be available where it is claimed by an individual farmer who carries on the farm business through a company. The leasing relief will be amended to also encompass farmers who have chosen to incorporate their business.

AGRICULTURAL RELIEF

Agricultural relief promotes the transfer of farms from one generation to the next and is an important measure to allow our young people to pursue their lives on the family farm.

In recent years, agricultural land has increased in value above inflation and it is difficult for genuine farmers to purchase the land they need for farming. To address this and concerns that agricultural relief is being used as part of tax planning strategies by wealthy individuals, I am extending the six-year active test to the person who provides the gift or inheritance. This measure supports current farmers and the next generation.

FARMERS FLAT RATE COMPENSATION

The House will be aware that the flat-rate scheme compensates unregistered farmers on an overall basis for VAT incurred on their farming inputs. Based on macroeconomic data received from the CSO and the Revenue Commissioners for the period 2022 to 2024, it is proposed that this rate be increased from the current 4.8% to 5.1% from 1 January 2025.

RESIDENTIAL ZONED LAND TAX (RZLT)

The residential zoned land tax is an important lever to activate the building of houses on appropriate sites which have been identified by local authorities across the country. It is important that the measure does not unduly impact landowners who carry out genuine economic activity on their land. Therefore, I am providing an opportunity for these landowners to avail of an exemption in 2025 if they seek to have their land rezoned to reflect the activity they carry out on their land. The Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage will issue guidelines to local authorities indicating that they should consider and accommodate rezoning requests where landowners seek to continue undertaking existing economic activity.

SPORTS AND PHILANTHROPY

SPORT

Making good on the commitment by my predecessor, Michael McGrath, in last year’s budget speech, I will be bringing forward measures to support national sporting bodies in planning and investing for the future.

Changes will be made to the tax exemptions that apply to those bodies to facilitate long-term investments for the purposes of future capital projects and sport equipment needs to support Ireland’s high-performance athletes and wider sports participation.

Furthermore, I will be bringing measures forward in the Finance Bill to allow those making donations to sports bodies for capital projects and the other objectives greater flexibility in how those donations will be treated for income tax purposes. It is my intention that both PAYE and self-assessed donors will be able to choose for the income tax relief on donations under the relevant tax provisions to go either to themselves or to the sporting body itself. I believe that this will provide an additional incentive for taxpayers across the country to provide direct support to their local and national clubs and bodies.

I strongly believe that physical activity is an essential part of supporting the health and mental well-being of all our citizens, young and old. As such, I believe there is merit in examining how the tax system can help to achieve greater participation in sport and fitness activities, including through gyms, for example. Over the course of next year, my officials will continue this work with the view of developing proposals for consideration in advance of next year's budget.

CHARITIES/PHILANTHROPY

The five-year national philanthropy policy, launched last December, is key to fostering a new approach to giving. As an initial step in supporting the policy, I will remove barriers to charities having access to tax benefits under the charitable donations scheme. Charities will no longer have to have been established for at least two years to access the scheme, and will have a longer timeframe from the date of a donation to use the funds raised under the scheme for the important work they do.

HEALTH

TOBACCO

I am increasing excise duty on a packet of 20 cigarettes by €1, with a pro rataincrease on other tobacco products. This will bring the price of cigarettes in the most popular price category to €18.05 and supports public health policy to reduce smoking levels in Irish society. A financial resolution will be introduced tonight to enact this measure.

E-CIGARETTES (E-LIQUID EXCISE)

I am introducing a domestic tax on e-cigarettes on public health grounds as there has been a significant rise in their use. The tax will apply to all e-liquids at a rate of 50 cent per ml of e-liquid. A typical disposable vape contains 2 ml of e-liquid, and costs in the region of €8. This new tax will bring the price of such a product to €9.23, including VAT. Due to the operational and administrative challenges associated with this measure, it will not commence until the middle of next year and therefore will be subject to a commencement order.

STAMP DUTY

BULK PURCHASE

I share the concerns of aspiring homeowners that the bulk acquisition of houses impacts on the number of houses made available for purchase. To discourage significant purchases of houses by investment funds, I am increasing the higher rate of stamp duty on bulk acquisitions of houses from 10% to 15%-----

Mattie McGrath (Tipperary, Independent)
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You broke your heart.

Jack Chambers (Dublin West, Fianna Fail)
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-----with immediate effect.

BANK LEVY

I will extend the bank levy for a further year, with a target yield of €200 million. It remains appropriate that the sector continues to make a contribution to the Irish economy following the support it received during the financial crisis.

STAMP DUTY ON HIGH VALUE RESIDENTIAL PROPERTY

I have decided to increase the rate of stamp duty applicable to residential property valued above €1.5 million to 6% with effect from tonight. The existing rate of 1% will continue to apply to values up to €1 million, and 2% on values above €1 million, with a third rate of 6% to apply to any value in excess of €1.5 million, with immediate effect. Normal transitional arrangements will apply for transactions in process.

VACANT HOMES TAX

It is also important that we maximise the use of existing housing stock. Therefore, I have decided to increase the rate of the vacant homes tax from five to seven times the property's existing local property tax rate. The increase will take effect from the next chargeable period, commencing this November.

CLIMATE MEASURES

This Government has been responsible for a step-change in Ireland's climate actions and as the threats from climate change continue to manifest themselves, I am pleased to announce several climate-related tax measures in budget 2025.

VRT ISSUES

I am making a VRT amendment in respect of battery electric commercial vehicles so that they can qualify for the €200 VRT rate. Currently, due to their battery weight, BEVs are at a competitive disadvantage compared to their fossil-fuelled counterparts, and cannot qualify for this relief. Consequently, this amendment will bring them within its scope.

I am also introducing an emissions-based approach to VRT for B commercial vehicles. This measure will provide for a lower 8% rate for category B vehicles with CO₂ emissions of less than 120 grams per kilometre with a view to encouraging the purchase of such vehicles.

I am also providing for the accelerated capital allowances scheme for gas and hydrogen-powered vehicles to be extended for a further year. This will allow the Department of Transport to review the scheme to ensure it meets the needs of the heavy transport sector as it addresses the challenge of decarbonisation.

EMISSION THRESHOLDS

In relation to emission thresholds for vehicle capital allowances, I am planning to redefine the classification of a low emitting company car by reducing the maximum emission levels for qualifying for this relief for capital allowances purposes from less than 156 grams per kilometre to less than 141 grams per kilometre with effect from 1 January 2027. The rationale for the 2027 commencement date is to provide adequate notice to companies who provide such cars to their employees. This measure is designed to incentivise the uptake of EVs in the company car sector which will over time assist the acceleration of a second-hand EV market.

CARBON TAX

The rate per tonne of carbon dioxide emitted for petrol and diesel will go up from €56 to €63.50 from 9 October as per the trajectory set out in the Finance Act 2020. For other fuels, the rate increase will take place in May 2025, after the winter home-heating season. As per the commitment in the programme for Government, and as noted with approval by the ESRI, revenue raised from this increase in carbon tax is recycled to ensure vulnerable persons are protected from unintended impacts of the tax increase,-----

Mattie McGrath (Tipperary, Independent)
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What about the aeroplanes?

Jack Chambers (Dublin West, Fianna Fail)
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-----to part fund a socially progressive national retrofitting and energy efficiency programme, and to encourage and support farmers in the green transition.

HEAT PUMPS

I have decided to lower the VAT rate charged on the installation of heat pumps from the standard rate at 23% to the 9% reduced rate. This measure will complement the Government's national retrofit plan to transform Ireland's housing stock by retrofitting homes and installing heat pumps to replace older, less efficient heating systems.

MOTOR INSURERS INSOLVENCY COMPENSATION FUND

On behalf of the Minister of State, Deputy Richmond, and myself, I am pleased to announce that the Motor Insurers Insolvency Compensation Fund levy will be reduced from 1% to 0%. This reduction will be of benefit to up to 2.2 million policyholders on renewal from 1 January 2025 and follows the reduction of this levy from 2% to 1% in budget 2024.

REVIEW OF FUNDS SECTOR

Ireland has a leading position in the investment funds and asset management industry globally. The sector is a significant employer, supporting almost 20,000 jobs, with close to half of these located outside of Dublin.

Last year my Department established a funds review team and began a detailed forward-looking review of the funds sector with a view to safeguarding Ireland's leading position in the investment funds and asset management industry. I recently received their report, which I intend to bring to Government shortly and to publish thereafter.

OTHER MEASURES

I am extending the excise relief introduced last year for independent small producers of cider and perry to cover what is known as other fermented beverages which includes products such as mead and wines other than grape wine such as elderberry wine, strawberry wine, etc. In addition, I am extending this relief to higher strength cider and perry produced by independent small producers. CONCLUSION

I believe that budget 2025 is one that has the common good at its core. It allows us to ensure that we keep striving to provide better services and infrastructure for everyone, to build better communities and support social enterprise, to provide for those most in need, to ensure our indigenous businesses can grow and prosper, and remain a highly attractive and competitive place for international investment and business.

On the same day it was announced I was to be appointed Minister for Finance, this country lost one of the finest people, and undoubtedly the best commentator, we ever produced. Mícheál Ó Muircheartaigh, a legend in our country, always had such a way with words and his knowledge of GAA was unsurpassed. He was so knowledgeable in so many other ways too. I was reading through some of his memorable quotes which illustrated his superb command of language and his wisdom. Reflecting on his advice for young people on his 90th birthday, he said: "Always look forward to things. Look forward with hope. Hope is the greatest thing of all."

As elected representatives, I believe it is our responsibility and duty to foster a real sense of hope for the future, to inspire positivity, build a better State and demonstrate confidence about the possibilities ahead.

Mattie McGrath (Tipperary, Independent)
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You did not help the hospitality sector.

Jack Chambers (Dublin West, Fianna Fail)
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This budget is about the future. It reflects a commitment and resolve to responsible politics, economic resilience and a fairer society ensuring that together we can build a prosperous future imbued with optimism and hope.

I believe budget 2025 provides the ways and means for continuing to deliver many more, bright and hopeful days for us all. All this, and more, can be achieved because of the decisions we are taking today for our people, our communities and our country. Tá lánmhuinín agam as ár ndaoine agus as cumas na tíre i bhfad níos mó a bhaint amach. Tugann buiséad 2025 an bunús é seo a dhéanamh.

I commend the budget to the House.

Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael)
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Thank you, a Cheann Comhairle.

INTRODUCTION

Today’s budget sets out a positive path for the future while striving to meet the needs of today. It is a budget for an Ireland with a growing population, full employment, public finances in surplus and public services expanding to meet our country’s needs. This positive position is the result of a balanced and planned approach to stewarding our economy and the hard work of the Irish people. Before we look to the future, I want to take a moment to reflect on the past four years. A series of shocks from beyond our shores guided many of the measures taken in those budgets that I have had the privilege of delivering since the election of this Dáil.

Since 2020, we have faced unprecedented challenges and risks of economic instability. These challenges of a pandemic, war in Europe and spiralling inflation were external in origin, but caused real impacts here at home, which we have dealt with due to the careful management of our country's finances. Before I announce the measures in budget 2025, allow me to take a moment to highlight some of the lasting improvements that have been delivered despite those many challenges. Our investment has resulted in: 768,000 children benefiting from free school books, 500,000 children eligible for free school meals and 180,000 children benefiting from the national childcare scheme; a significant increase in expenditure in the health service resulting in outpatient waiting lists reduced by 50,000 since 2021 and our life expectancy reaching 82 years, the sixth highest in the EU; 116,000 new homes delivered since 2020; and a record number of people in employment – nearly 500,000 more than just before the pandemic – and a new public service pay agreement for our gardaí, nurses and teachers. The Minister for Finance and I absolutely appreciate the many challenges confronting so many of our citizens. We recognise the many difficulties that clearly exist, but here today we make the case that budget 2025 will make a positive difference to those difficulties, just as previous budgets have.

EXPENDITURE STRATEGY

Our strategy during this Dáil was to grow and improve public services by increasing our spending by 5% each year. Given the nature of the challenges that we confronted, including inflation and the pandemic, the 5% anchor was simply not appropriate to cover the growth and expansion of services our country needed and needs. Instead, our Government provided a robust response to the challenges we confronted to ensure the most vulnerable in society were protected, supports were available for individuals, families and businesses from the pandemic unemployment payment to cost-of-living supports, our economic growth was sustained and strengthened, and our growing population was provided for with investment in a higher level of public service provision. Our strategy was the right one. We made essential adjustments to it, depending on the particular set of challenges we were facing. Not to do so would have meant not being able to protect and to provide for our people during times of the greatest need.

I am sometimes also asked why we do not spend more of our budget surpluses. During the pandemic, to keep people safe, we had to ask people not to go to work. Hundreds of thousands of people became unemployed with the Government spending billions of euro to support them and businesses during this difficult time.

Just as our country and we were getting back on our feet, the cost-of-living crisis hit, and we were in a position to help once more as prices went up. That is the reason to run budget surpluses. It allows for flexibility and gives us a far better chance of being able to deal with the risks that we do not see coming.

Every budget process is a balancing act. We are tasked with making difficult decisions and we know that our choices have a real impact. I am confident that the decisions and how we spend our money, such as investing surpluses in the Future Ireland Fund and the Infrastructure Climate and Nature Fund, will greatly benefit our nation in the decades ahead.

BUDGET 2025

Indeed, our public finances continue to show strength. They show resilience, and budget 2025 will build on the progress made in the Government’s previous four budgets. As set out in the summer economic statement, this budget sees expenditure of €105.4 billion. This is an increase of 6.9% on last year.

LIVING STANDARDS

A Cheann Comhairle, turning now to the specific spending measures, we are all so aware that we are still feeling the impact of the external factors I mentioned earlier. Although inflation has thankfully come down, prices have been slow to follow, and cost-of-living increases of more than 19% between January 2021 and August of this year have left many in our country worrying about their finances.

While we have successfully insulated the lowest earning households from the worst effects of the price increases, the Government is still conscious that prices remain high and we remain committed to protecting the most vulnerable in our society through a series of supports.

COST OF LIVING

Budget 2025 will include an energy credit of €250 for all households. It will be paid in two equal payments, one before the end of the year and one after. A further €300 lump sum payment will be made to recipients of the fuel allowance in November.

An additional €200 will be paid to recipients of the living alone allowance. There will be a €400 payment to those who receive the carer’s support grant, disability allowance, blind pension, invalidity pension and domiciliary care allowance in November of this year.

To support parents and students, funding will continue for the school transport fee reduction and the State exam fee waiver.

I am also providing for: the continued reduction of the student contribution fees by €1,000, a once-off reduction of 33% in the contribution fee for apprenticeships in higher education and an increase in the postgraduate tuition fee contribution by €1,000 for student grant recipients. I am also providing additional funding to support students at a time of increased strain from cost of living through the student assistance fund.

SOCIAL PROTECTION

In addition to those measures, which are temporary, to help at a moment of great challenge for many, I am pleased to announce a social protection package for 2025 worth €1.2 billion that is targeted to those with the greatest needs.

This includes: an increase of €12 per week for an individual in receipt of a weekly social protection payment and further support to those with a disability and carers. I am increasing the carer's allowance means test disregard to €625 for a single person and €1,250 for a couple, increasing the rate of the domiciliary care allowance by €20, increasing the carer’s support grant by €150 to €2,000 and enabling the carer’s allowance to be made a qualifying payment for the fuel allowance.

To further support families and children, the following will take place: I am increasing maternity, paternity, adoptive and parents’ payments by €15. We are increasing the weekly rate of the increase for the qualified child payment by €4 for under 12s and by €8 for over 12s. We are extending the hot school meals programme to all remaining primary schools in 2025 and introducing a school meals holiday hunger pilot project next summer. We will then introduce a newborn grant of an additional double child benefit payment, in addition to the first month of child benefit.

2 o’clock

This will be a €420 payment to families for each newborn child.

I am also pleased to announce a further €1 billion for a range of cost-of-living supports, including an October bonus double payment for recipients of long-term social protection payments. Nearly 1.4 million people will benefit. These are our pensioners, those with disabilities, our carers, lone parents and those who are long-term unemployed.

CHILDREN AND FAMILIES

The ambition of this Government is for our country to be one of the best countries in the world in which to be a child. We have made eradicating child poverty an absolute priority in the last five years and have delivered a complete overhaul of supports available to parents. Under this Government, investment in early learning and childcare has increased by 95%, from €567 million in 2019 to €1.4 billion in 2024. Free GP care has also been made available to all children under eight.

Mattie McGrath (Tipperary, Independent)
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If they have a GP.

Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael)
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To provide further support to families raising children, two double payments of child benefit will be made to all qualifying households in November and December. There will also be a double payment of the foster care allowance. To ensure our supports are targeted to those families who need them most, a €400 lump-sum payment will be made to recipients of the working family payment later this year. The budget also provides a lump-sum payment of €100 per child to recipients of the qualified child increase payments.

When we talk about the future of Ireland, we are not just talking about our infrastructure or economy. Fundamentally, we are talking about the young people who will go on to lead and look after our society and country. Today, I am allocating €8.3 billion to the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth, with investment in early learning and childcare increasing to nearly €1.4 billion. Funding for the national childcare scheme will increase by 44%. What does this mean? This investment means that next year parents will see full-time childcare costs reduce even further by an additional €1,100. In addition, the number of children availing of this scheme is set to increase to 216,000 in 2025.

A €336 million increase is being provided for disability services to provide additional residential care beds, more respite, more home support hours and a day service place for school leavers. We will increase the Tusla budget to €1.2 billion to provide more residential placements, increase therapeutic services and provide payments for foster carers for initial placements.

EDUCATION

At the core of how we create a brighter future for our young people and country is education. Developing a dynamic, inclusive and affordable education system allows us to build the Ireland of tomorrow. That is why, in education, a capital allocation of €1.3 billion will support 350 building projects that are currently under way, as well as a further 200 new school projects. Budget 2025 will provide the funding for 768 additional special education teachers and a further 1,600 special needs assistants.

Building on the success of the Keeping Childhood Smartphone Free initiative, 2025 will see the roll-out of supports to allow our post-primary schools to do just that during the school day. This policy is about how we support the well-being of our children and give them the best possible learning environment. The budget will also see a substantial increase in funding for the school transport scheme in recognition of its importance in providing access for children living remote from their nearest school.

Reducing the cost of education is a priority for this Government. I am providing funding to extend the free schoolbooks initiative to all transition and senior cycle pupils in recognised post-primary schools within the free education scheme. Just as education is one component in ensuring a thriving country, so is feeling supported in times of ill health.

HEALTH

In July, I reached an important agreement with the Department of Health and the HSE to provide additional funding of €2.7 billion for the health sector over two years. It provides a stable funding plan, bringing the total health allocation to €25.76 billion. We agreed that this additional funding would support better financial planning and governance, establishing a clearer link between this level of funding and the improved health outcomes that are happening.

Our health service workers are central to this work. In 2025, the numbers working in our health service, not including disability services, will reach over 130,000 whole-time equivalents, an increase of 27% since 2019. The budget will also include funding for a range of new measures that will increase access, affordability and capacity in our health service, including the introduction of 495 new beds to our health service across hospital and community services, bringing the total number of beds to over 18,000; 600,000 additional home support hours; and continued support for women’s health measures, including increased access to IVF and hormone replacement therapy free of charge.

This budget will also include funding to facilitate the continued development and improvement of mental health services, as set out in the national mental health strategy, Sharing the Vision. Implementing this strategy is an important commitment in the programme for Government and it is a huge priority for the Government, the Department of Health and the HSE. That is why the funding provided in this budget will enable enhanced provision of services, including with regard to youth mental health services; counselling for the Traveller community; suicide bereavement counselling; the CyberSafeKids initiative; and additional children and adolescent mental health services. This budget ensures the health service is well funded and is able to deliver better access and better health outcomes into the future.

INFRASTRUCTURE AND BETTER PUBLIC SERVICES

Now, governments all over the world, are encountering new and varied challenges linked to climate change, public health, security and more. We want to provide the necessary infrastructure and the right level of growth in services to ensure they deliver for all our citizens, whether they were born here or chose to make their home here. This is an absolute priority for this Government - the right infrastructure in the right place-----

Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú)
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At the right cost.

Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael)
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-----at the right time.

ADDING TO OUR INFRASTRUCTURE

I wish, therefore, to briefly address the funding arising from the recent decision of the Court of Justice of the European Union. These funds are estimated to have a current value of €14.1 billion. This is, as the Minister, Deputy Chambers, acknowledged, a very significant amount of money.

A Deputy:

You did not want it.

Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael)
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We also need to recognise that this amount is one-off and equal to the sum we are already planning to invest in the national development plan next year alone. It is vital, therefore, that we make the best use of these funds and get the best outcome for the long term. The Government has agreed the principle that these funds will be invested to expand our infrastructure for the future development of the country. We have identified water, electricity, transport and housing as the four strategic investment pillars.

Investing in these areas will support the needs of our people, assist in growing our economy and help in meeting our climate and nature goals. Officials from my Department and the Department of Finance are now beginning work on developing the framework for the use of these funds to ensure co-ordination with decisions already made in the national development plan.

NATIONAL DEVELOPMENT PLAN

Through the record investment in this plan, we are now increasing infrastructure delivery while also ensuring value for money. We are investing sums well above the average in the European Union through the national development plan. A significant number of capital projects have already been delivered, including 500 km of new walking infrastructure, 170 km of new roads and the expansion of rural public transport through the Local Link service.

Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein)
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You forgot about your bike shed.

Seán Crowe (Dublin South West, Sinn Fein)
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And the children's hospital.

Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael)
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Today, I am providing an additional €1.7 billion for 2025 for more homes and schools, for improvements in our hospitals and to tackle climate change. This will include an investment of €400 million in the national broadband plan. Next year, total capital investment will be close to €15 billion, the highest annual spend ever in our country. As we focus on infrastructure and the growing needs of our population, the most fundamental of these is having a home in which to live.

HOUSING

In budget 2025, I am providing over €7.8 billion to the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage, including:

- a further investment of €3.2 billion in capital funding to build more homes and address affordability constraints for households, and of this, €2 billion will be available in 2025 to deliver 10,000 new-build social homes;

- €680 million will be allocated to affordable housing schemes, supporting the delivery of 6,400 affordable homes in 2025, and it will also support additional grants under the vacant refurbishment property grant scheme to bring units back into use and turn them into homes;

- an unprecedented €1.65 billion in current funding will continue to support the 64,000 households in active social housing tenancies and will also provide for:

- an additional 7,400 new social homes next year, as well as continuing to support over 38,000 social housing leases already in place, and;

- 10,000 new homes will have their housing needs met under the housing assistance payment and rental accommodation schemes in 2025.

- a further €168 million in funding to support the regeneration of towns and urban areas and to deliver the infrastructure we need to support the growth in their delivery;

- support for specific categories of need are also delivered in this budget, with €23 million being provided to deliver Traveller community-specific accommodation; and

- a further €100 million for grants to adapt the homes of older people and people with disability.

I am also allocating €90 million to retrofit approximately 2,500 social homes in 2025, demonstrating the State’s commitment to help people reduce their energy bills and ensure our country can meet our climate targets.

INFRASTRUCTURE, CLIMATE AND NATURE FUND

In doing this, the Infrastructure, Climate and Nature Fund is one of the funds we have established to manage windfall tax receipts and help us prepare for the future. This fund has two very important roles: first, to ensure we have money to invest during periods when the economy is not doing so well; and, second, to invest in climate transition to prepare for and make happen a greener future. More than €3 billion is being set aside for this second role between 2026 and 2030. We will shortly set out how this money will be invested to provide a clear and consistent signal to those who wish to invest in these ambitions. The allocation process will be subject to further work between myself and the other Ministers. It will be used to support important projects that can assist with the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, improve our water quality and improve on and deliver our nature and biodiversity objectives. What this will mean in practice is supporting projects that help Ireland to meet our climate and environmental obligations and ambitions, including climate neutrality. This will improve the lives of the people of Ireland. Further details on this proposed approach are set out in documentation published by my Department today.

CLIMATE

It was, therefore, very positive to record a 6.8% reduction in Ireland’s greenhouse gas emissions last year, although we know we need to do more. As we continue to invest in this, we will see further benefits, including warmer homes, less congestion in towns and cities, enhanced biodiversity and cleaner air and water. In support of these goals, capital funding for the Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications has been increased to over €1.14 billion, allowing for record allocations to be made for investment in energy efficiency and renewable energy. Warmer homes funding will reach a record level and is likely to reach more than ten times the funding provided in 2020, which will increase the number of homes benefiting from deeper retrofits. Funding will also support up to half of the cost of energy efficiency upgrades being met by the State, complemented by loans supported by the State. To support our farmers in becoming more environmentally sustainable, over €716 million is being provided next year for those participating in agri-environmental schemes, such as ACRES.

CARBON TAX

Alongside this, the application of our carbon tax remains an integral part of our climate action response as a Government. It will increase by €7.50 per tonne as part of this budget. What this will mean is that it will bring the total carbon tax revenue that is available for investment to €951 million. Half of this amount will go to paying for the improved energy efficiency of our homes, which is an additional €89 million next year compared to this year. In addition, the carbon tax will fund €306 million of social protection spending next year. An additional €44 million for targeted measures, namely, changes to the qualified child payment and an increase to the income eligibility threshold for the working family payment, will ensure that the most vulnerable are protected from unintended impacts of the tax increase.

As we seek to build on this and identify ways to reduce our carbon footprint, one of our clearest avenues to doing this is our transport system.

TRANSPORT

A strong transport system is necessary for our climate ambitions and for our connectivity. A connected Ireland is a forward-facing Ireland. That is why, today, I am announcing €3.9 billion for the Department of Transport, with over €1 billion in current funding and €2.9 billion in capital funding. This will deliver:

- more capacity on the public transport routes we have;

- ongoing investment of almost €1 million per day in cycling and walking infrastructure;

- continuation of temporary fare reductions on public transport to the end of 2025, including the young adult card for 19 to 25-year-olds and the 90-minute fare;

- free public transport to be extended to children aged five to eight years of age; and

- a new and modern Coast Guard search and rescue contract.

Additionally, I am pleased to announce that a financing agreement has been reached between the Port of Cork and the Ireland Strategic Investment Fund to extend the port’s quay-side berth at Ringaskiddy.

This agreement, a €99 million financing package, will allow the Port of Cork to develop the multi-purpose infrastructure that can help to meet the needs of the offshore renewable sector. It will be and is a significant milestone in our ongoing commitment to deliver a greener and more sustainable future.

AGRICULTURE, FOOD AND THE MARINE

A key driver of that greener future will be our agrifood sector, a driving force that supports communities across the country. This is why I am allocating over €2 billion for the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine for next year. This shows the broad support of the Government to all the sectors, ensuring that we support our farmers, fishers and foresters. This is because the agrifood sector is a core part of our rural communities and our largest indigenous industry. Budget 2025 will support an innovative and sustainable sector that enriches our biodiversity, protects our landscapes and contributes to our economy. It will provide additional funding for a range of supports across sectors, including: €30 million for a new tillage scheme to support farmers to plant their field crops; €10 million for animal health measures improving biosecurity; €22 million for the continuation of the national sheep welfare scheme into next year; and €8 million to enhance payment rates on the national beef welfare scheme.

Some €143 million of carbon tax funding will be provided to the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine. This will help to continue to support our farmers as they work to improve our biodiversity, climate, air and water quality. This Department will also administer over €1.2 billion of EU funding in direct payments to farmers.

RURAL AND COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT

This Government believes that the development of sustainable communities is necessary to drive enterprise growth, increase remote working capability and also, and most importantly, to support our people in growing and flourishing. I am providing €472 million for the Department of Rural and Community Development. This will help deliver important commitments set out in Our Rural Future and the national development plan and will promote social inclusion in both urban and rural areas. The Department will have total capital funding of €235 million in 2025 to support the revitalisation of rural Ireland through schemes including the rural regeneration and development fund, the LEADER programme, the town and village renewal scheme, the outdoor recreation infrastructure scheme and the CLÁR programme.

ENTERPRISE AND SKILLS

Our ability to fund these schemes and all else in this budget depends on a growing economy. The enterprise sector lays the foundations for economic growth, our well-being in the future and our prosperity. We must also recognise the difficulties businesses have been facing. To support them we are investing over €1 billion in the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment’s jobs and enterprise development, innovation and commercialisation and regulation programmes in 2025; capital funding to enable IDA Ireland and Enterprise Ireland to provide additional environmental aid to their clients; and almost €7 million in additional funding to the Department’s regulatory bodies and agencies.

Recognising that rising energy costs continue to have an impact for hospitality and retail businesses, I am today announcing an energy subsidy scheme for these businesses, worth €170 million. This will provide support to approximately 39,000 firms.

FURTHER AND HIGHER EDUCATION, RESEARCH, INNOVATION AND SCIENCE

This budget will also provide over €4.5 billion to the Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science. This is a further demonstration of the Government's commitment to investing for our future.

NATIONAL TRAINING FUND

In my budget speech last year, I spoke about the role of the National Training Fund in providing vital funding for skills and lifelong learning and I committed to further work on how we can build on this opportunity. As the House knows, the fund is in surplus due to the growth in the numbers at work and also the increased contribution employers are making through their PRSI receipts.

Today, I am announcing an almost €1.5 billion package over a six-year period to 2030, comprising both current and capital investment to better fund research, further and higher education, skills, development and decarbonisation. This multi-annual commitment will include an increase in core funding to higher education by €150 million per annum. The main focus of this will be on meeting the funding requirements of our universities, as set out in the Funding the Future framework. This in turn will deliver additional healthcare and veterinary places under the expressions of interest expansion programme and an increase in certain PhD stipends.

The funding for further education will support: €78 million for the continued growth of our craft apprenticeship system, a system that is vital to the future growth of our economy, and will provide 6,800 apprentice registrations in 2025; skills requirements in micro, small and medium-sized enterprises to build business for the future, as well as upskilling for the community, voluntary and social enterprise sector; and the development of construction and the talent we need for a greener future in providing the people and skills to address Government priorities, such as Housing for All and the climate action plan.

SAFETY AND SECURITY

JUSTICE

This Government is committed to building stronger, safer communities. With this in mind, I am announcing a package of over €3.9 billion for the justice sector. The record allocation available for next year will allow for a significant increase in funding for the Irish Prison Service, with recruitment of up to 350 additional staff and investment in areas such as prisoner care and rehabilitation; recruitment of a further 1,000 gardaí and up to 150 Garda civilian staff; a significant expansion in the international protection processing system, providing 400 additional staff in this area; and an additional €7 million for organisations providing supports to victims of domestic and gender-based sexual violence.

Joe McHugh (Donegal, Fine Gael)
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Hear, hear.

Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael)
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We are working to maintain a safe and secure Ireland and to support where we can overseas.

DEFENCE

Crucial to this goal is the work of the Defence Forces, for which I am announcing an allocation of €1.35 billion for 2025. This is a 22% increase in the capital investment to a record allocation of €215 million to enable the advancement of major defence equipment and infrastructural upgrades, such as military radar and subsea surveillance projects.

In recognition of the significant transformation and reform under way in the sector, this allocation will also provide for the recruitment, training and support of a net increase of 400 Defence Forces members in next year; and investment in measures such as enhanced advertising for recruitment, equipment maintenance and a new and improved Defence Forces uniform. This increase builds on the increased investment of recent years and underlines the commitment we have to the transformation of the Defence Forces through the work of the Commission on the Defence Forces and the independent review group’s recommendations.

CULTURE AND SOCIETY

I believe Ireland holds a unique position in the world, where our culture, ár dteanga and our artists are the beating heart of our society. There are record numbers of people visiting our national cultural institutions. Irish writers are some of the best in the world. They give us pause to reflect on the world around us, to make sense of it and, occasionally, to escape it entirely for a moment. This is why for next year I am allocating almost €380 million to arts and culture; €107 million to the Gaeltacht to provide a wide variety of supports to our Irish-speaking communities in the Gaeltacht and beyond; €226 million to tourism; €328 million to funding in media, including €6 million for the independent broadcasting sector; and €231 million in funding to sports, which will benefit clubs and organisations in every corner of our country.

GLOBAL ROLE

A Leas-Cheann Comhairle, we can be proud of our tradition as a champion of peace and prosperity across the globe. We are privileged to live in a country that has robust and fair democratic systems, high levels of trust in our public institutions and a strong economy. This privilege brings with it the ability to invest in peace and development here on our own island at home and in our Continent and across the world. Our Government continues this commitment across a number of areas.

OUR SHARED ISLAND

We will, therefore, continue to support the shared island initiative. We will engage with communities to build consensus towards a shared future and deliver benefits for the whole island. This will be delivered by advancing strategic projects such as the Narrow Water Bridge; contributing to the A5 north-west transport corridor upgrade and linked road projects in Monaghan and Donegal; and through co-funding the co-centres for research and innovation with the Northern Ireland Executive and the Government of the United Kingdom. The Taoiseach and the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom have committed to resetting relations between Ireland and the UK. We will allocate the resources to support this important work.

EU FUNDING

Being a member of the European Union has been transformative for Ireland. It has given us a powerful global voice on the world stage. EU funds have contributed to improving our country and have invested in our people’s future through education and training to improve their lives. This is why I am providing significant additional resources to the Department of Foreign Affairs to commence the preparations for the very important policy work that will take place during Ireland’s Presidency of the Council of the European Union in 2026. I am also providing an additional €35 million to support the Global Ireland strategy.

IRISH AID

Next year will see the highest ever allocation to overseas development assistance, when funding for international co-operation in the Department of Foreign Affairs will increase by €35 million to go above €810 million. This allows us to invest in the programmes abroad that protect nature, respond to climate change and provide humanitarian assistance to those who are so vulnerable. It aligns with the approach we take at home in helping those who come to our country as a result of war, poverty and other global challenges. Part of our international role is to welcome those coming to Ireland who need our help. A total of €2.1 billion is being provided to support accommodation for those fleeing Russia’s illegal war in Ukraine and to support those seeking international protection.

COMMUNITY RECOGNITION FUND

In addition to the core funding for rural and community development for 2025, I am providing €13 million to help integrate arrivals from Ukraine into our local communities. This will enable the social inclusion and community activation programmes that are doing such important work to continue to support new arrivals and to support those already in our communities. I am also providing an additional €25 million to the community recognition fund, to support the communities welcoming those who are in such need.

PERFORMANCE BUDGETING AND TRANSPARENCY

We know that all of this work does not exist in a vacuum. It is important that we recognise and measure the impact of the decisions that go just beyond their monetary cost or impact. For that reason, my Department uses performance, equality, green, and well-being budgeting as a key component of our spending review process so that we can measure and judge the full impact of the decisions being made today.

CONCLUSION

A Leas-Cheann Comhairle, we live in a volatile world. It is a world in which the pace of change is accelerating and the level of complexity is building, but the scale of opportunity is growing. This is why we must run budget surpluses. This is why we must set aside some of our country’s money for the future. This is why we must invest our recent gains in the Ireland of tomorrow and not spend everything today, no matter how tempting.

In my years serving as a Minister for Finance for our country I have led our finances from deficit to surplus twice. These healthy public finances have allowed our country to build more homes; to keep and create jobs; to invest in our future and a greener future; and to improve our public services, all while dealing with the crises of a pandemic, a war in Europe and then soaring inflation.

The politics and economics of the centre, of a steady approach to the many and competing demands, of embracing the opportunities and responsibilities of our role in the world, of supporting growth and jobs under this Government, is an approach that is working. Let me be clear. Making the case for progress is not the same as denying the reality of the many pressing problems that I know exist. This Government appreciates the urgency of the challenges of today. We are working to meet them head on. But, with optimism and with hope, I say to the Dáil, look at what our country has achieved in recent years, look at what we have overcome. Look at what we can yet do. Look at what lies ahead.

Our recent budgets, and the choices that the Minister, Deputy Chambers, and I are presenting today, have and will play an essential role in this, in lessening our problems, in pursuing the great opportunities that await, and in building a better Ireland with a brighter future for all. That is why I commend budget 2025 to Dáil Éireann.

Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein)
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This is the last budget from this Government and like all others there will be a spending increase. But the question we must ask ourselves, as with all other budgets, is if it will make the big difference that people need in their lives and the difference they are crying out for. Will it address the housing crisis, and make housing affordable, as laid out by Sinn Féin? The answer is no, it will not. Will it fix the health service that is on its knees? No, it will not. Will it address the cost-of-living crisis in a meaningful way? For example, will it abolish USC on the first €45,000 of income for all workers? No, it will not. Will it deliver the fundamental change that we need in our childcare system by introducing childcare for €10 per day for families across the State? Again, the answer is "No". The answer is "No" because this Government is incapable of delivering real change. It is incapable of getting value for money. People see through the spin. People hear about the millions and billions of euro but they do not feel better off. For most people it is about what they have at the end of the week and if, when the bills are paid, there is anything left. That is the question they ask. The answer for far too many is "No". Workers and families cannot afford another five years of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. It is in this context that the budget will be judged and how the Government parties will be judged at election time. This Government has been exposed over and again as serial wasters. They treat the public with contempt when they waste taxpayers' money on every project, big or small.

These go from a bike shed, to the national children's hospital, to a security hut, to modular units for Ukrainians that are costing more than semi-detached houses built with bricks and mortar. That is the record of the Ministers sitting opposite me. That is what we get after Fine Gael has been in office for 14 years and no one takes responsibility, no one is held to account and the merry-go-round goes around and around. The Government wasted €10 million on lawyers, fighting a losing battle to deny the State €14 billion that it now wants to dish out.

Despite the budget being announced today, we still feel poor as a country in so many ways, such as in housing in health, in disabilities and in mental health. The Government's job is not just to spend money; it also needs to get results. That is where the Government is completely and utterly failing. Under Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, people see a deepening housing crisis. Month after month, we pass new, shameful milestones in housing with record homelessness, rents and house prices and nobody takes responsibility. We have a Minister for housing and that is his record. Yet, he stands up here an applauds a Government that does not provide any new additional social and affordable homes. Everyone suffers when this Government fails to build the homes that are needed. Higher rents and higher house prices are the consequences. Sinn Féin is committed to bringing homeownership back within the reach of working people.

This Government is great at spin. It has talked over and over again about homeownership. To be clear, since this Government came into office, house prices have risen by €100,000, on average, in Dublin. That is the record of the Government. The other record it has is that homeownership for young people has collapsed under Fine Gael. There are 100,000 fewer people under the age of 40 who own their home today than when Fine Gael came into government 14 years ago. That is the Government's record. It has halved the number of people who own their home in that age bracket. It is a failure so big that it is hard to believe. On the other end, Fine Gael has more than doubled the number of people who are in their 60s and are still renting because they do not own a home. At the same time, the number of people in their 20s who are renting has completely collapsed. Why? They are not renting because they are living in their parents' box rooms or they are on a plane on the way to Australia. That is the record of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael and that is why we cannot afford another five years of these two parties.

Many of these individuals are nurses, doctors, teachers and other essential workers. This does not just have an impact on them or on their families but it also has an impact on the wider public services that we all rely on in the State. In the Ireland of 2024, in a State where we are recording a surplus of €24 billion, we have children with autism being denied their constitutional right to education. Let that sink in. In the Ireland of 2024, with a surplus of €24 billion, children cannot get assessment of needs and parents have gone for years without therapies for their children. These are simple, basic things, such as speech and language therapy or the assistance that a child needs to be able to eat, speak or walk. In the Ireland of today, we are a poor country when it comes to issues like this. These are basic needs that any First World country should be able to deliver. Over and over again, however, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael continue to fail these families that are crying out for assistance. They want assistance to help their child to speak or to eat. They have been left fighting for these basics for year after year.

The most glaring reminder for all of us in this House and outside, is the Government's failure for the children with scoliosis and spina bifida. In the past 24 hours, another parent had to go public with her child's heartbreaking story. No parent should have to do that because the State should provide the services for those most in need. No parent should have to campaign, fight or battle the State for what his or her child deserves. However, under Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael in the Ireland of 2024 with €24 billion of a surplus, parents have to fight and expose their children to that and battle every single day. It is not acceptable. The longer they wait, the worse the condition gets. It is a race against the clock against the child's condition becoming inoperable. What did today's budget do for them? It gave them no more hope for these children than they had yesterday. That is what the budget will be judged on. This Government has all the financial resources, but completely fails to deliver on basic services. That has been the hallmark of the Government's term in office. It has squandered money and five years. The Government will be judged on that when the general election comes.

Tá Sinn Féin tiomanta d’úinéireacht tí a chur ar fáil arís d’oibrithe agus gnáthdhaoine. Tá an t-éadan ar an Rialtas labhairt faoi úinéireacht tí ach tá titim as a chéile tagtha ar úinéireacht tí do dhaoine óga faoi Fhine Gael. Tá níos lú ná 100,000 duine faoi 40 bliain d'aois ina n-úinéirí tí anois ónar tháinig Fine Gael i gcumhacht. Laghdaigh sé an méid daoine óga a bhfuil teach acu féin faoina leath. Is ábhar uafáis é an ráta tithíochta seo agus is deacair é a chreidmheáil. Tá líon na ndaoine atá ag ligean tithe ar cíos agus iad ina 70idí ag ardú toisc nach bhfuil siad ábalta tithe a bheith acu. Níl na daoine óga, iad ina 20idí, ag ligean tithe ar cíos toisc go bhfuil siad ar an bhealach chun dul ar imirce. Tá go leor de dhíth anseo. Cuireann sé seo isteach ar sheirbhísí poiblí, seirbhísí a bhfuil daoine ag brath orthu. Mar gheall ar an easpa áiteanna i scoileanna, tchímid páistí i gcruachás nach bhfuil ábalta a gcearta bunreachtúla dlíthiúla i gcomhair oideachais a bhaint amach. Fágadh 120 páiste gan scoil ag tús na scoilbhliana. Is rás in aghaidh an chloig é do go leor teaghlaigh, go háirithe iad atá ag déileáil le spina bifida nó scoliosis. Níl aon rud déanta sa bhuiséad seo le faoiseamh a thabhairt dóibh. Ní bheidh aon rud difriúil dóibh sna blianta amach romhainn faoin cháinaisnéis seo.

This is not a giveaway budget. This is a giving-up-on-housing budget. The Government has raised the white flag when it comes to housing, affordable housing and renters. This budget gives nowhere near the funding required. This means that the same inadequate social and affordable housing targets are being delivered. The Government is not planning to build a single social and affordable house more that it has already committed to. It has completely ignored the Housing Commission's report, which was a damning indictment of Government policy. The report accuses the Government of failing to treat housing as a priority. In this it was absolutely right. It called for a radical reset of housing policy and this budget again shows that the Government is incapable of delivering the radical reset needed. To not increase the targets at all is shocking. Not only is it shocking, it is an insult to everybody who is struggling to get an affordable house or pay rent. After eight years at the Cabinet table, what we heard recently is that the Taoiseach started talking about building more homes. This budget exposes that this is nothing more than soundbites. Not a single increase in housing targets is allowed for in this budget. This is a Taoiseach who cares more about headlines than he does about housing and this budget proves it.

Sinn Féin has a plan. In government, we would deliver 300,000 homes.

Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael)
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No, you would not.

Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein)
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We called on the Government to deliver 21,000 social and affordable homes in the budget and 100% redress for those living with defective blocks in Celtic tiger apartments. Not one penny more has been provided for those schemes, despite them being expanded. For regeneration of inner-city flat complexes and those communities that have been waiting for decades, there is nothing from this Government.

Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael)
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It is all provided for.

Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael)
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It is happening.

Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein)
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Sinn Féin would make sure that they were central. We need to tackle the issue of dereliction in our cities, towns and villages. That is the scale of the ambition needed. The Minister can shake his head all he wants. Every year he has sat at the Cabinet table, the housing crisis has become worse. House prices,rents and levels of homelessness have gone through the roof. Homeownership for those under 40 has collapsed under this Government's watch. I will take no lectures from Fine Gael or Fianna Fáil in this matter.

Damien English (Meath West, Fine Gael)
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Sinn Féin wanted to build fewer houses. Bear that in mind.

Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein)
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The Government needs the scale of ambition to match what has been put forward by Sinn Féin. The truth hurts, as we hear from the heckling here. It is a sore point that not a single extra social or affordable home above the existing targets have been provided.

We have long campaigned for the renter's tax credit. Do you remember that one, Paschal? You fought me tooth and nail on that and said it should not happen, because it would go into the pockets of landlords. The Minister needed to do two things; a tax credit and freeze the rents. He did one and did not do the other. To Deputy Donohoe, I say he may as well be writing those cheques and putting them into the landlords' pockets himself, because that is what is happening.

Bernard Durkan (Kildare North, Fine Gael)
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Negativity.

Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein)
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Under the watch of Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, what has happened to the average rents?

That is for existing rents. The increase for new rents is actually way higher than that. It is the same across the State. The tax credit the Minister is providing is going into the pockets of the landlords but I suspect he knew that all along. It is just another way to feather the nests of landlords. One of the things the Minister, Deputy Chambers, did not mention in his speech is the fact that he is giving a tax break of €112 million to landlords this year as their tax breaks increase from €600 to €800. Every single official in his Department told him this was a bad idea and said that half of the landlords in the State will not pay tax under this proposal. It again shows the priorities of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael in this area.

This Government has made a lot of sound about the issue of childcare-----

Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael)
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I would not mention child welfare.

Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein)
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-----but, when we look at delivery, the Government again falls short. Key to supporting families is the availability of affordable childcare. Sinn Féin has shown how childcare could be delivered at €10 a day. That would have been a game-changer for families but the Government would not go there. This could be delivered next year for all parents in centre-based childcare and Tusla-based child measures and then rolled out to all other childminders. We now see that all the Government's talk about supporting parents is just talk. There is no further reduction in the cost of childcare planned for next year. That is a fact. There is a lot of spin coming from Mr. Soundbite but, when it comes to substance, we see that childcare costs will not be reduced.

Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael)
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How is your press office? When did you know, Pearse?

Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein)
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The public will have their opportunity to decide if they want a party-----

Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael)
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Do not bring up children in here today.

Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein)
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-----with real vision, ideas, plans and commitment or the soundbites we hear from Government benches.

Sinn Féin knows that the cost of raising a family does not stop when your child reaches the age of 18. We would stand up for students and parents by abolishing third level fees, starting with a reduction of €1,500 next year. Again, the Government refuses to go there. It talks about a temporary reduction. What is required is the scrapping of third level fees, beginning immediately. Fees for apprenticeships should also be scrapped. I say to every family and to everyone starting a family that Sinn Féin's commitment is clear; we will make raising a family affordable.

Families and workers are impacted by the cost-of-living crisis. As we all know, the cost-of-living crisis is not over. Energy credits of €250 do not cut it. They simply do not go far enough. We proposed an energy credit of €450. As the Government knows, the €250 is mostly going to be eaten up by the increased charges that are coming. Households continue to struggle with the weight of high energy bills. Electricity prices in July of this year were 47% higher than they were three years ago. Irish electricity remains the most expensive in Europe. What is the Government's record? Some 230,000 households are in arrears with their electricity bills. That is 20,000 more than last year. Under Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, things are getting worse when it comes to energy. People are struggling-----

Mattie McGrath (Tipperary, Independent)
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Not a bit of relief.

Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein)
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-----with the cost of living in so many ways. We called on the Government to tackle this, to deliver a fair tax package for all workers and to give workers and families a break. We said they needed their money put back into their pockets. What the Government has instead brought forward again in this budget is a two-tier tax package. It picked winners and it picked losers. Someone on €150,000 will get €959 in tax breaks but a worker on €40,000 will get €369. The Minister knows this.

Micheál Martin (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail)
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That is not true.

Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein)
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The Taoiseach also knows it. That is half of all workers in the State. The tax package for half of all workers in the State will be €369. There was a fairer way to do this. In our budget proposals, Sinn Féin showed how the Government could have cut tax fairly in a way that benefits all workers, including those on low and middle incomes. That is what it should have done. We also would have abolished the USC for the average worker and made sure that no worker paid the USC on the first €45,000 earned. The Government's proposal is for a two-tier system that leaves average workers and the majority of workers in this State benefiting by less than €370. Everybody should have been given a fair share.

As I said, Sinn Féin will stand up for ordinary workers and families. Compare this with the Government, which has not given workers on the lowest wages a decent increase. Sinn Féin called for a €1.10 increase to the minimum wage. That would have meant an extra €2,220 for our low-paid workers.

Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael)
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It is better to have our small businesses.

Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein)
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Ireland has one of the highest rates of low pay in the European Union. That did not happen by accident. It happened as a result of Government policy. We would support businesses' transition from lower wage employment with a PRSI rebate of €250 million targeted at the employers most impacted by increases to the minimum wage.

The Minister did not say anything about gold-plated pensions. He snuck that out in a press release last week. I have been responding to budgets for 14 years and never once has there been a bigger tax break for an individual in those 14 years. This Government has given a massive tax break to people with gold-plated pensions, increasing the standard fund threshold to give tax breaks on pension pots of up to €2.8 million. This gives an individual a tax break of €320,000. Neither in my time nor, I am guessing, before has there been a tax change that benefits certain individuals so much. Who are the only people who can benefit? Who are the only people in that golden club who will benefit from that change? It is people who already have a pension pot in excess of €2 million. They are the only people who will benefit from the Government's €320,000 tax break. I expect that sums it all up. It is a question of sneaking it out a week before the budget so the Minister does not have to be embarrassed standing up here to announce €320,000 for the wealthiest in Ireland. It is disgraceful.

Our three banks made over €2 billion in profit in the first six months of this year and yet, despite the billions of euro in windfall profits they are making, there is no increase in the banking levy. The public sees very clearly where the Government's priorities lie. Fine Gael was out in the media and issuing a lot of press statements recently. It was very upset that Sinn Féin wanted to tax luxury private jets but its Members gave a standing ovation to the Minister who is going to increase the price of petrol and diesel for ordinary workers, people who want to drop their kids to school or go to work or who need to go to a hospital appointment. Perhaps they do not know this but the reality is that the richest 1% are responsible for more carbon emissions than all middle and low-income workers together. Despite this, they are not being asked to bear their fair share of the burden. The Government just jacks up the carbon tax over and over again. This is a regressive tax that hits low-income and rural houses the hardest. We already have one of the highest carbon taxes in Europe. There are tax cuts for some and carbon taxes for everyone else. Sinn Féin's plan for funding the green transition fairly is very clear.

If you ever wanted an example of a government incapable of delivering change, you need only look to this Government's record on health. It is absolutely heartbreaking. I am sure Government Members know these patients as well as we do. It is heartbreaking to see what is going on. There are children in pain or forced to eat through feeding tubes. There are children whose condition is deteriorating and others who have to wait months for life-changing surgeries. As we know, money is not the issue. We have been running surpluses for years. Time is not the issue either because Fine Gael has been in government for 14 years. For God's sake, the Taoiseach was the Minister for Health for four of those years. The issue is not time or money but the Government. That is the issue. That is why we have the health service we have. There are no more excuses. The new children's hospital, the contract for which was signed by the Taoiseach, Deputy Harris, is still not open.

Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael)
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I did not sign the contract. Produce the contract.

Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein)
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The cost has overrun by hundreds of millions. Are you trying to deny you had any involvement in that, Simon? Is that what you are trying to say?

Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael)
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You just said I signed the contract.

Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein)
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Is that what you are trying to say, that you had no involvement in that?

Aengus Ó Snodaigh (Dublin South Central, Sinn Fein)
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Ouch.

Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein)
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All the while, on the Taoiseach's watch, the Bill goes up. When BAM said it would withdraw-----

Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael)
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Do you remember your proposal?

Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein)
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-----Deputy Harris said "No way, keep going" and he kept writing the cheques.

Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael)
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Do you remember your proposal?

Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein)
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Almost a million people-----

Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael)
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It was to stop it and not build.

Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein)
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Are you finished, Taoiseach? Almost a million people are on waiting lists. We have all been waiting. We have been waiting for this Government to get its act together but it has not happened and is not going to happen. It is becoming harder and harder for ordinary workers to see a GP. Dental treatment for people with medical cards has collapsed. Mental health services in this State are threadbare. Everybody knows that. People who are reaching out and looking for support on the other side are not getting it. This is having devastating consequences for our young people. Last year, in the face of all this, the Government knowingly underfunded health. That was one of the most callous decisions I have ever seen. It was an extraordinary example of reckless management and Sinn Féin and others called the Government out on it immediately. The HSE called it out. The Government's own Department of Health called it out. Indeed, IFAC called it out. It took nine long months for the Government to admit it had it got in wrong in last year's budget. That did real damage to morale, to the reputation of the health service and to care providers' ability to plan.

3 o’clock

That decision led to a year of chaotic financial management and a recruitment embargo. All the while, the HSE was forced to become more and more reliant on expensive agency staff. Today, therefore, was the opportunity for the Government to lay out a vision for health and to lay out a vision for hope, but there is no hope, no vision and no urgency in the budget for health this year. Again, there is more of the spin. The Government has claimed there is a €3 billion increase for health. Let us be serious, however. Last year, the Government underfunded health and now it is playing catch up. Of that €3 billion, €1.5 billion is to cover last year's legacy deficit that was created, while €1.2 billion is standstill money. This means no improvement in services, it is just to stand still. When we strip all that back, therefore, and consider the fact that €240 million has already been announced in the form of pre-committed capital in the national development plan, it leaves €120 million for new measures-----

David Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein)
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Hear, hear.

Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein)
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-----to cover beds, urgent care, women's health, older people, mental health and national strategies. This is a paltry sum.

Rose Conway-Walsh (Mayo, Sinn Fein)
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It is a joke.

Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein)
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There is going to be chaos in our health system next year, just as there was each year before because the Government is deliberately not making the types of improvements and reforms required with the funding that is necessary. It stands in stark contrast to Sinn Féin's comprehensive proposals. We have a plan to reform the health service, boost capacity, train the workforce of tomorrow and reduce the costs for ordinary workers and families. We would take big, bold steps towards universal healthcare, delivering 150,000 additional medical cards today. This is what is needed. We would slash the cost of medications for all households, reducing the drug payment scheme maximum payment from €80 to €50. We would phase out car parking charges and reduce prescription charges. The Government has done none of this. Sinn Féin would have funded a multi-annual plan to tackle overcrowding in our hospitals and we would have delivered major investment for workforce planning to train the health service of tomorrow.

We called on the Government to provide a social welfare package to support families, carers, pensioners and people with disabilities-----

Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael)
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We did.

Jennifer Carroll MacNeill (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael)
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It is exactly what we did.

Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein)
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----- to protect people from the cost-of-living crisis in the here and now, to make a lasting difference in people's lives and to tackle social exclusion and poverty. The Minister, Deputy Donohoe, talked about child poverty being a priority of the Government. Some 230,000 children are currently experiencing material deprivation. This is an increase of almost 30,000 children since 2022. If that is a priority, the Government is fairly failing at it.

Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael)
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Read the budget.

Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein)
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The rise comes amid a 3% real decline in the average disposable income of households with children. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have failed families and failed children, and child poverty is deepening as a result. Child benefit is a crucial tool for tackling child poverty and supporting families. After Fianna Fáil crashed the economy in 2008, it made children pay. Remember that, Micheál? It made the children pay. It cut the child benefit across the board. Fine Gael continued to put the pressure on children and families.

Micheál Martin (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail)
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We never kneecapped children anyway. Has Sinn Féin ever apologised?

Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein)
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Initially-----

Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael)
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We never-----

Jennifer Carroll MacNeill (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael)
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Yes, let us-----

Seán Ó Fearghaíl (Kildare South, Ceann Comhairle)
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Deputies, please.

Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein)
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Listen. None of your bull. You cut the child benefit and you squeezed the children further.

Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein)
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That is the reality.

Micheál Martin (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail)
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Has Sinn Féin ever apologised?

Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein)
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Is Deputy Micheál Martin trying to deny that Fianna Fáil cut the child benefit or is Fine Gael trying to say it did not make cuts to child benefit for later children and abolish the grants for multiple children? That is the reality, folks. Do not deny reality; own it and embrace it.

Micheál Martin (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail)
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I do not deny the kneecapping that you guys did.

Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein)
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Fine Gael then cut child benefit across the board by a further €10 for the first and second children and there was a steeper cut for the third child.

Mary Butler (Waterford, Fianna Fail)
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Talk about today's budget. Let us hear what the Deputy thinks of today's budget.

Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein)
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Today, the rate is still below where it was in 2008, despite the fact that we have €24 billion of a surplus. That is how children were made to pay during the austerity period and Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael will not deal with it. That is why child poverty is getting worse under Fine Gael's watch.

That is why there are 30,000 more children in material deprivation under Fine Gael's watch. This is the politics of today. These are the consequences of the Government's decision and the decision to slash that support in the first instance by both parties and then to decide to keep it at that level. It is a mistake, and a mistake that parents will pay a very heavy price for.

The first test of a republic is how to protect the most vulnerable. The decision to increase payments for citizens with disabilities by only €12, given the high cost of disability, is simply unacceptable. What should have been provided is what Sinn Féin proposed, which is a €20 increase in the weekly rate of disability-related payments. We also proposed the most substantial package of supports ever presented by any party for carers in a single budget. That means the means test, which we all know unfairly excludes thousands of carers from receiving the carers allowance, being abolished. That is why we are very clear that Sinn Féin in government will abolish the means test for carers. Starting this year, it should start with a significant expansion of the scheme. We called for increasing the threshold for carers from €900 to €1,460 for a couple. That is five times what the Government did last year and ten times what the Government announced this year.

Rose Conway-Walsh (Mayo, Sinn Fein)
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Hear, hear.

Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein)
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The Government did make announcements, but riddle me this, why did it single out carers? Why are carers the only category of people who will have to wait until July to get the benefit of what has been announced? What have carers done? Why are they not able to benefit like anybody else on 1 January 2025?

Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael)
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There will be a number of benefits before Christmas.

Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein)
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Would the Taoiseach like the floor to answer the question?

Mattie McGrath (Tipperary, Independent)
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The Government lost the referendum.

Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein)
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Why is the carer's allowance means test change not available to them in January and why did the Government single them out as the only category of people who must wait a further six months? It is disrespectful to carers and the work they do. As I said, what needed to be done here was an announcement of the abolition of the means test. This would really make a meaningful difference in the lives of carers. For many, they are locked out of the support they need.

Ó thaobh na Gaeltachta de, tchímid go bhfuil fadhb mhillteanach ó thaobh líon na gcainteoirí Gaeilge ag titim sa Ghaeltacht. Níl ach teaghlach amháin as gach cúigear ag tógáil a gclainne le Gaeilge. Caithfidh go bhfuil a fhios ag an Aire Airgeadais, an Teachta Chambers, é seo mar bhí sé ina Aire Stáit na Gaeltachta roimhe seo. Tá €6 milliún breise curtha ar fáil sa Ghaeltacht. Níl sé seo maith go leor ar chor ar bith nuair atá daoine óga agus daoine eile ag scairteadh amach le hathbheochan na Gaeilge sa Ghaeltacht. Tá freagra ag Sinn Féin. Chuir muid polasaí chun tosaigh a chuirfeadh €45 milliún breise isteach i gciste na Gaeilge agus na Gaeltachta agus a thabharfadh tacaíocht d’Údarás na Gaeltachta, teaghlaigh agus mná tí. Is cinnte go mbeadh Aire tithíochta agus Aire sinsearach Gaeltachta dírithe ar cheist na tithíochta fosta. Thabharfadh muid €500 breise in aghaidh achan pháiste a bheadh á thógáil trí Ghaeilge faoi scéim labhairt na Gaeilge. Bheadh go leor eile lena chois sin.

We have seen over the past while that the tax revenue is available. The country is recording surpluses. The Government has had time and money but it has failed to make an impact. These heightened levels of corporation tax give us a window of opportunity to address the infrastructure deficits and to build houses at scale, but we have to cut through the spin. That is why each budget the Government has announced has failed to make the difference. What people are crying out for is that this budget would not just paper over cracks. Workers are worse off in real terms than when this Government came to power-----

Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael)
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No.

Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein)
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-----and workers and families cannot afford another five years of Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil. Every day this Government is in office, it squanders valuable time.

David Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein)
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Hear, hear.

Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein)
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It also, however, squanders taxpayers' money. Even though he is in charge of the OPW, it was interesting that the Minister, Deputy Donohoe, did not mention during his 45-minute speech any of the projects the Government is wasting millions on, including the bike shed, the national children's hospital, the security hut and houses for Ukrainians that have seen a 120% increase. Yet the Government tries to preach prudence and fiscal rectitude. This budget was supposed to be about giving people hope, but it does not. When the dust settles, people will see through this budget, like they have with all the others. They will see it for what it is: more of the same and less than we need. It will be seen as a Government that has no big ideas. Not one big idea was put forward in this budget by a Government that has all the resources. It is a Government that is incapable of delivering the change required. It is a Government and a budget that fail to deliver on the basic things, the things we should be taking for granted: having a roof over our head, healthcare when we need it, a wage we can live on and making sure our children are protected, secure and treated when they need that support at that time.

There is an alternative and we have shown that the alternative is there. The alternative is Sinn Féin and we will put our plans, our vision and our determination to the people. I say, therefore, to the Taoiseach: let us call the election, let us put this to the people and let the people decide who presents the next budget.

Rose Conway-Walsh (Mayo, Sinn Fein)
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Hear, hear.

Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael)
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Let us pass this budget first.

Rose Conway-Walsh (Mayo, Sinn Fein)
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Today is the day this Government will try to buy the Irish citizens with their own money. Its desperation to cling onto power permeates this budget. Ministers queue up to clap themselves in the back for divvying out the spoils to the electorate to persuade them to turn a blind eye to how they have been failed, how their families have been failed and how their communities have been failed. I wonder whether they will thank Commissioner Vestager for the part she has played in this in fighting to give us the €14 billion due to us. People know we have been here before, with the empty promises, the repeated announcements of the same projects, the claims that lessons have been learned, accompanied by feigned expressions of "everyone was responsible", yet nobody is accountable.

Again we see the squandering of hard-earned money collected from people's wage slips, tax returns from the self-employed and VAT on almost every item purchased. Blank cheques have been written with other people's money. The shocking waste of money has rightly angered people who struggle to make ends meet and who are denied services and supports they desperately need. They are angered by the €336,000 bicycle rack, the €1.4 million security hut and the escalating overruns of most expensive hospital in the world. Why did the current Taoiseach, who was Minister for Health at the time, sign off on a contract that needed 469 change orders and more than 23,000 drawings? Now we have modular homes costing €442,000 each, more than double the original projected cost of €200,000. This level of bungling and ineptitude demands more than commentary from the Government that failed to carry out its duties. The delays for children who grow into adulthood without having access to the levels of services and treatment promised by this Government from the children's hospital are devastating and the consequence of money being sucked up by the national children's hospital debacle is delays in the expansion and refurbishment of regional hospitals and other health facilities.

Bernard Durkan (Kildare North, Fine Gael)
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That is not true.

Rose Conway-Walsh (Mayo, Sinn Fein)
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This impacts on patients and healthcare staff throughout the State. The people in Mayo want me to ask how many more projects are handled in the same manner. How much more of our money is wasted? How much more is this Government hiding from us? How many times is commercial sensitivity used to cover up costly mismanagement of projects and the granting of open-ended, undefined contracts? Lessons are never, ever learned by Fine Gael or by Fianna Fáil. Let us cast our minds back to 2005, a time when the country was awash with money just as it is now. The Celtic tiger roared loudly, Fianna Fáil and their friends partied on borrowed money they should never have been lent in the first place and citizens were later forced to pick up the tab of austerity. Is it any wonder that people are saying here today that we should talk about the here and now and forget about what has happened up to now? I remind the Government that the HSE's PPARS computer system, estimated to cost €9 million ended up costing in excess of €220 million, almost 25 times more than the initial costing. Here we are, 20 years later but have lessons been learned? No, they have not. Why? It is because no one responsible every pays; only the taxpayers pay. Transparency matters, accountability matters and competence matters. Tá tábhacht ag baint le saoránaigh.

Today we hear more promises and over the next couple of days we will watch the unedifying scramble of Ministers and backbenchers as they fight to get on the airwaves to blow their own trumpets. The fact is that we have had decades of solid evidence to prove that Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil will again be reckless and careless with our money. Over the past 13 years too many people have been left behind by Fine Gael-led Governments. Too many people have suffered the consequences of bad policies and the failure to keep promises, not least the children who have been made to wait too long for their spinal surgery, the children with scoliosis who were promised. The Taoiseach has left the House now but he promised. They were promised. When I saw them last week, after Deputy Mary Lou McDonald hosted them in the audiovisual room, being pushed out in chairs in the pouring rain, it brought it home to me how much this Government has failed. A 15-year-old boy came into my office who has been told it is too late and the Government will not even give him a second opinion abroad. I got a letter from the Taoiseach wishing him "all the best". My God, he promised but he certainly did not deliver.

Today there are more promises from the parties of empty promises. Today we sit here surrounded by billions of euro, 14 of which Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil fought to have spent elsewhere. In fact, they spent €10 million of taxpayers' money fighting so that one of the richest companies in the world could benefit from being facilitated to pay no tax on €104 billion in profits. Lest anyone try to misconstrue Sinn Féin’s support for foreign direct investment and acknowledgement of the 250,000 plus jobs in Ireland, our commitment to remain competitive by urgently tackling the infrastructure deficit, particularly in housing, renewable energy, water, telecommunications and decarbonisation, is absolute, alongside our commitment to investment in education and training. The new OECD minimum corporation tax rate means it is more important than ever to invest in the drivers of foreign direct investment. Our indigenous businesses deserve tax fairness and opportunities to thrive. Our overreliance on a very small number of companies to produce year-on-year surpluses leaves our small open economy in a precarious position and vulnerable to geopolitical shocks, yet the Government has no explicit strategy to grow the regions and address key infrastructure deficits, particularly along the western seaboard. The Atlantic economic corridor is paved with empty promises and rhetoric. Macroeconomic headlines mean little to people who do not have a home of their own or cannot pay the bills.

Tar éis 13 bliain den Rialtas seo, tá sochaí an-míchothrom fós againn. The wealthiest 10% of Irish households own approximately €518 billion or 48% of total household net wealth in the country. This creates conditions where extremely disadvantaged groups end up pitted against each other for the allocation of resources and this will continue after this budget. More than 500,000 people live in poverty, almost 177,000 of whom are children, yet we are one of the wealthiest countries in the world. People rightly ask why. One of the Government’s biggest privileges and responsibilities is the task of devising policies to reflect the needs of the population it serves. The needs of those who give it the power to protect, to cultivate opportunity and to break the cycle of poverty are never met. Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil have failed miserably. We know that living in poverty can have extensive and multifaceted effects on individuals, families and communities. We know too that enforced deprivation and financial and educational disadvantage can be transgenerational without the right interventions. How deep will the scars of child homelessness, the denial of access to psychology, mental health supports, speech and language therapies or other vital supports run? How many generations will be crushed by the failures of Fine Gael-led Governments over the past 13 years?

The Housing Commission called for a radical reset of housing policy. Tá an leabhar scríofa ag Eoin Ó Broin and the answers are there. That is the radical reset. Sinn Féin has clearly shown how we can bring homes back into reach for people. The Government keeps lauding itself about how successful its housing policies have been. Just imagine the situation if they had not been successful. We could have 14,500 people homeless and more than 4,000 of them could be children, an affordable home could cost €500,000, crippling rents could be a reality and the average age for owning your own home could be 39 if the Government's policies had not been so successful.

Home owners impacted by the defective blocks scandal must have 100% redress and we must have a public inquiry into how thousands of families were conned into buying and building homes that turned out to be worthless.

Pádraig Mac Lochlainn (Donegal, Sinn Fein)
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Hear, hear.

Rose Conway-Walsh (Mayo, Sinn Fein)
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Again, there was no accountability. Everyone scattered. We have to have a public inquiry, which the taxpayer will pay for, but we have to find out the truth. We know what happened. We know how they have been failed by this and previous Governments.

All of the measures introduced by the Government today are, by necessity, dealing with the fiscal space in the here and now but I do not want our nation restricted by what currently exists. We have the potential to reimagine our society and to turbocharge our national economy through Irish reunification. Sinn Féin believes that citizens have the right to national self-determination. Addressing this by holding the referendums included within the Good Friday Agreement is a Sinn Féin priority. Éire nua aontaithe, le cearta ár saoránaigh ag a croílár, atá uainn. The Irish Government has a constitutional obligation to pursue and prepare for unity.

A Sinn Féin Taoiseach would immediately begin structured and detailed planning towards Irish unity, underpinned by engagement with citizens across the country. We would establish citizens' assemblies on Irish unity to discuss all of the elements of reunification, to listen to all voices and to hear from experts. Sinn Féin backs the implementation of the Perspectives on Constitutional Change: Finance and Economics report, prepared by the Oireachtas Joint Committee on the Implementation of the Good Friday Agreement. It recommends a Green Paper on constitutional change, the creation of a dedicated Oireachtas committee, a designated Department for constitutional planning, a whole-of-government approach across all Departments and State agencies, and deeper co-operation on the island on issues such as climate change, energy, education, transport and infrastructure. These are commonsense proposals backed by the entire Good Friday Agreement committee and they should be implemented without delay.

Across the island people who would not previously have considered unity are opening their minds to considering what future constitutional arrangements might work best for them and for their families. Those people across the country who are British, unionists and Protestants are a valued part of our nation. I respect their culture and traditions. I want them to contribute to the wisdom, ideas and hopes for a new and united Ireland. Together we can create an inclusive home that we all can be proud of.

Turning to the health, where is the transparency for the funding in health? The Minister mentioned all the national strategies for cancer, cardiac, stroke and maternity, but did not say how much. We have €30 million for new drugs, just reprofiling what was already there. Where is the money to expand the hospitals and community care, and for the mental health for older people? My litmus test is whether the trolleys will still line up outside Mayo University Hospital. My guess is they will. Will the beds that the Government closed in Belmullet hospital be reopened? How long more do we have to wait? It did not just happen; the Government made a decision to close them just as it did with many other hospitals around this country. People will not be fooled.

How many people's lives are shortened because they do not have the money to access timely treatment or they have to wait months for a scan? Sinn Féin's multi-annual plan will deal with overcrowding, reduce waiting lists, improve patient safety and deliver healthcare free at the point of use. As Deputy Doherty said, that includes increasing hospital capacity for an additional 150,000 people. Ministers tell people that the moratorium has been lifted. The moratorium has not been lifted. Valuable staff are waiting on panels while hospitals are waiting for people to be appointed. The Minister should not pretend that the moratorium has been lifted because it has not. He should go and see what is happening on the ground.

Half of all people living with a disability are at risk of poverty. This State has the lowest employment rate of people with disabilities in Europe because the barriers to employment for people with disabilities have never been tackled. For too long lip service has been paid regarding the rights of people with disabilities. Sinn Féin in government will deliver those rights. The Government has presided over the scandalous delays for people waiting for assessments of needs for years. Additional funding announced earlier this year will not keep pace with demand and longer waiting lists will be the outcome. Parents and guardians are forced to seek private assessments which in many cases they cannot afford since the Government has effectively abandoned their children. Last week we saw and every week we see Cara Darmody, a teenager, leading the demonstration outside the gates of this Parliament on this very issue. That child should be at school and not protesting here and begging for these issues to be addressed. This should be a source of deep shame for this Government.

I want to mention the inquiry into families affected by sodium valproate. Some people have multiple family members living with disabilities as a result of mothers following medical advice. Has the budget thought of them? They had to fight for years to get the inquiry that is now happening.

Denial of treatment reduces life chances - it does not take a genius to work that out. We are a rich country and we can do things differently yet the choices are made by the most senior politicians in this State to deny assessments, delay access and diminish outcomes. The Sinn Féin alternative budget would fund targeted recruitment and retention measures for children's disability services and establish a community care access fund to speed up access to mental health, disability diagnosis and interventions. Poverty rates by households headed by people with disabilities are unconscionably high with 39% of this group experiencing poverty. We must ratify the optional protocol to the UNCRPD and fully implement and resource the necessary actions.

Carers who provide unparalleled service to those in their care and to the State have also been forced by the Government to become campaigners. Mary Lou MacDonald has given a commitment to abolish the means test for carers. Many of the things we outlined in our alternative budget are to give advice to the Government and tell it what needs to be done. However, as we see here today, moving the eligibility threshold to €1,250 will not even be done until next July. That shows what it really thinks of carers. We would also introduce a pay-related carer benefit to enable carers who are in employment to access supports.

Our alternative budget provides access to vital therapies, respite services, residential care, personal assistant services, home support hours and day services. These are the measures that citizens need to live with dignity. In our alternative budget Sinn Féin has clearly outlined how we will reduce the cost of childcare to €10 per day, how we will really value childcare workers, how we will ensure that childcare providers are sufficiently funded, and how social enterprises and community providers can be encouraged and expanded.

Sinn Féin recognises the responsibility of all citizens to deliver on Ireland's objectives to meet our climate change targets. Climate change affects everybody and ultimately impacts several Departments. However, the party also recognises that this is a burden not currently equally shared by everyone. With this in mind we intend to ensure that those least able to carry more of the costs are supported in that journey to decarbonise by committing an additional €178 million to a new and reformed scheme delivering warmer, more efficient, less carbon-intense homes, improving health and well-being, and directly addressing the cost of living. I heard the Minister today laud the extra money to be given to the warmer home scheme. There is a 26-month waiting list for the warmer home scheme. I have known people who have died waiting to have their houses insulated even for basic insulation.

In conjunction with the retrofitting scheme we also acknowledge the importance of decarbonising our energy supply and the security of our energy supply. Furthermore we recognise as we focus on delivering economic growth in a more circular bioeconomy with sustainability at its heart, we have the ability to generate a plethora of new jobs with the green economy, building community wealth across the country, ensuring that all can benefit from transition. We have also committed an additional €75.5 million to be invested in green spaces and nature restoration to address biodiversity demands, and expand afforestation and grow our national parks, all underpinned by the development of a pipeline of skills and expertise in new jobs to support economic, environmental and social sustainability at local and national level.

As children must be able to get to school safely, we have made provision for an extra 100,000 seats for children on school buses. Adequately resourcing on climate can deliver tangible benefits in health, education and agriculture in the economy. Investment in climate solutions can present opportunities and benefits for all. Sinn Féin demonstrates that addressing climate change is not just a prerogative of those less fortunate in society; it is everyone's prerogative. This budget should deliver more fairness and equity for society and more benefits for the environment than the Government proposes. What is happening is that the money will go to the richest people. Other people will be left in homes and left shut out of schemes that are wrongly designed by the Government. Why are people not accessing the schemes? It is because everything this Government does is skewed in favour of those who do not need it and those who have money already. The Ministers know this from the retrofit scheme and what is happening in their own constituencies.

Sinn Féin fully acknowledges the importance of the agrifood industry to the Irish economy. The industry provides employment for more than 173,000 people across 135,000 farms, 2,000 fishing vessels and more than 2,000 food and beverage producers and is the glue that holds the rural social fabric together. It binds communities together and delivers wealth to rural towns and villages across the 32 counties. Much of the revenue the industry delivers locally is spent locally between retail, the service sector, food processing, manufacturing and engineering. The list goes on. This is why we in Sinn Féin firmly believe it is imperative that direct supports be assured and strengthened to ensure that farms can remain viable, sustainable and profitable to deliver the high-quality foods and public goods now demanded.

Sinn Féin’s alternative budget is not just about the food produced. It is also about the social contract that has been broken by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. It is also about the public goods that agriculture delivers as we commit to supporting areas of natural constraint and pledge to set up a commission on the future of family farms. Our party understands the value of family and the value of family farms. It is not just about onshore food production. We recognise as an island nation just how important aquaculture and our fishing fleet are. This commitment to the industry is copperfastened by €8.1 million for the introduction of a continuity fund for the inshore fishing fleet and a further €9 million identified for a number of industry support schemes.

A Sinn Féin government would have a Minister dedicated to fishing and the marine because we value them.

Deputies:

Hear, hear.

Rose Conway-Walsh (Mayo, Sinn Fein)
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As a party we know the challenges that farmers, fishermen and rural dwellers face. Not only can agriculture deliver on food and decarbonisation objectives, we firmly believe the industry has a role to play in decarbonising other sectors of business and industry, delivering on biodiversity, nature restoration and energy security.

Farmers in ACRES are in limbo. An announcement has been made today but they have had months of craziness, with thousands of farmers still waiting for proper payment and vital information on scoring results. I have listened to the words of those in Macra and Irish Rural Link, both excellent organisations. They have told of a crisis in mental health among the farming and fishing community. The truth is that the Government has abdicated its duty to rural Ireland.

In May last, Irish Rural Link held a round-table discussion with rural young people. One young participant said he was the only one of 16 friends from school left in the town. What does the future hold for this young person with no social networks? This pattern is repeated across the State. This is why Sinn Féin wants to build a country so these young people can come back. This includes my son, who started his job in London yesterday. When I rang him last night he told me not to worry because they were all Irish there. They are all the same age as him, at 23 years of age. It is a shame that we are losing these people to other countries.

Deputies:

Hear, hear.

Rose Conway-Walsh (Mayo, Sinn Fein)
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That is why we have to create a country to which they can come back. Agriculture operates on an island-wide basis and our commission on the family farm would include representatives and stake holders from all 32 counties.

Under the Government, we have seen the imbalance in regional development laid bare. It is true that the eastern seaboard, Dublin and other cities must be supported but to do this at the expense of other regions is not just unfair, it is foolhardy. Rural solutions solve national problems, particularly the congestion around Dublin. Investment in regional airports, such as enabling Knock airport to reach its full potential, is vital. No doubt we will have a flurry of promises again about Knock airport, the western rail corridor and everything else just before the election. Prior to all the elections before this, we had the same flurry of announcements.

I wish we were in a scenario where people in rural Ireland could rely on public transport, but across rural Ireland we can hardly get a bus shelter, never mind more regular routes and services. The irony of the Government's provision of the €336,000 Leinster House bike shelter is not lost on people in my constituency in Mayo and others left standing in the rain waiting on buses that often never come while we beg for bus shelters. Sinn Féin's alternative budget would invest heavily in public transport. We would progress the Navan rail line and the western rail corridor and we would accelerate the Connecting Ireland rural bus scheme. We would also invest €25 million to make public transport, including buses, more accessible for citizens with disabilities.

Our roads need urgent attention. This is a matter of public safety, not just transport. We would also scrap the Government’s fuel hikes on petrol and diesel introduced last August and we would not proceed with the increases due this month. Research by the Northern and Western Regional Assembly shows that counties Mayo, Galway, Roscommon, Sligo, Donegal, Leitrim, Cavan and Monaghan received less than 10% of the State-wide total investment in infrastructure projects worth more than €1 million, and just 5.7% of investment from infrastructure projects worth more than €20 million. These facts speak for themselves. The Government can dress them up all it wants. This is despite the region accounting for 17.6% of Ireland’s population. Out of the 234 regions across the EU, the north west ranks 217th for infrastructure. That speaks volumes to rural Ireland. The Government cannot hide from those figures.

The housing crisis does not discriminate and people who live their lives as Gaeilge and who want to raise their families as Gaeilge cannot do so because they cannot find or build a house in the Gaeltacht regions. If our budget was being implemented today, there would be capital investment of €15 million to support Údarás na Gaeltachta and implement an Irish language capital programme. We would also increase baseline funding for Údarás na Gaeltachta and introduce a rescue package for coláistí samhraidh agus mná tí.

Last week, at an event in the University of Notre Dame, Iar Taoiseach Leo Varadkar spoke of de-emphasising the Irish language in relation to unionists and the potential for Irish unity. Let me say clearly in this House, under a Sinn Féin government both Irish unity and the development and expansion of the Irish language would be progressed. The Irish language is flourishing in the North, including in areas with large unionist and Protestant populations.

Our communities deserve a police service which keeps them safe, responds to crime promptly and is adequately resourced and supported. Gardaí are simply stretched too thinly to cope. They put themselves at risk on a daily basis because there are not enough of them. Under Fine Gael's watch, we have seen the worst rioting in memory on the streets of our capital. Shops and businesses were plundered and looted while their frantic owners repeatedly phoned for help to no avail. The fault lies with the Government, the so-called party of law and order which has presided over chaos and crime. Sinn Féin would fund the largest Garda recruitment drive in the history of the State. We would invest in youth and community services and €1 billion of the Apple tax would be invested in communities that have been trod on and left behind.

The Government’s job is not just to spend money, it is to get results. The hollowness of the Government seeking credit for giving people back their own money once they have wasted loads of it by its incompetence is not lost on people. People will continue to struggle under this Government and the policies that have failed them for over a decade now. The Government will continue to try to buy votes with voters own money. Do we really want a situation where we have another five years of Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, whereby every child in the State under the age of 18 would know nothing other than a Fine Gael Government in charge? That is the decision before the Irish people - 18 years of Fine Gael Government with no child knowing any different and thinking this was normal. This is not normal and we must never ever make it normal.

Gerald Nash (Louth, Labour)
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I will share time with Deputy Duncan Smith. The Ireland of 2024 is a country of winners and losers. It is a country of contrasts and contradictions. It is a paradox of plenty, if ever there was one. We have record corporation tax receipts and record numbers of our citizens without a home. We have the highest number of people ever at work, yet one in five of these workers subsists on wages below a living wage. We have surpluses the envy of Europe, with public services and creaking infrastructure that should shame us. We have an apparent economic miracle papering over the cracks of the daily, sadly now routine, indignities of crushing child poverty.

The Irish Boundary Commission was set up 100 years ago this year. It formally divided our island, and that was a tragedy. A century on, the policies of Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil have succeeded in dividing the people of this State socially and economically, winners versus losers. It need not have been this way, but these were the choices made by Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil. Politics is about choices. A few short years ago, our country was bust and our options were limited. Now, for the first time in our history, after a decade of uninterrupted growth, money is not the problem. It is a lack of imagination and vision that is holding our country and its people back. The Labour Party is different. We are ambitious for Ireland. Our country is at a crossroads and it needs a change of direction. An election should be called now. Never before was the Labour Party, the progressive centre left, more needed in government to shape a better and fairer future for this country to help get the basics of a rich country right.

On the way here this morning, I passed a takeaway food van parked across the road from 3Arena and the name on it was "It's All Gravy". These days, that is given to mean it is all good, but it is not all good - far from it. The literal phrase I read this morning is apt for this so-called giveaway budget day. There is gravy everywhere, a deep dinner place drowned in tasty once-off measures to hide the fact and reality that there is very little real meat on offer to sustain anyone. It is an insult to the intelligence of the Irish people. The tragedy of this Government is that it has contrived to waste a boom. Strangled by its own crippling conservatism, the Government's ideology has made this rich country feel so poor, all presided over by Schrödinger's Taoiseach, Deputy Harris, the man who manages to be both in government and in opposition at the same time.

It used to be the case that no thought was spared for TikTok. Now, no thought from the Taoiseach, no matter how trivial or frivolous, goes unsent to grateful hacks dutifully and diligently reporting on them. The conduct of this budget is a case in point. Frankly, I was fully expecting to see copies of the Ministers' budget speeches in my pigeonhole in Leinster House this morning when I picked up my post. They were not there. They were everywhere else. The utter disrespect shown to the Members of this House and, indeed, Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil and Green Party backbenchers, with the farcical feeding frenzy of leaks going back to spring, is breathtaking. The Ceann Comhairle believes in the primacy of this Parliament. I believe he should make public statements on this. It is damaging. The Government is playing every day with people's lives so people can get their names in the newspapers. It is self-serving and arrogant. It does politics a disservice. It undermines good government and militates against the kind of big thinking that this country needs and that this Government, on all of the evidence over many years, is simply incapable of doing. It is a political culture, with some exceptions, dominated by ego. It is all about getting your name in the paper rather than getting things done. It is about time we grew up. Other mature European countries - sophisticated democracies - do their budgets professionally and respectfully. They actively involve parliament, not actively bypass and ignore it. Things need to change.

The business of governing the Ireland of 2024 is an accountability-free zone. There is so much cash on the hip that Ministers feel they can avoid and evade responsibility for indefensible cost overruns on key public projects like our long-awaited children's hospital. They are always on hand to take credit but never around to accept responsibility. We live in very peculiar political times but real accountability is on the way. We need an election now. That is where accountability happens, as it should.

This summer's non-stop briefings were revealing. It was an insight into the narrow ideological mindsets of parties that were once rivals but are now indistinguishable from one another. You could paper the walls of Leinster House ten times over with pearl-clutching opinion pieces from Fine Gael TDs and Ministers on the injustices of inheritance tax thresholds. I was on the verge of calling Amnesty International to see if it could help the Minister of State, Deputy Richmond, with a postcard campaign. I was very worried about him. Where is the anger? Where is the same anger over the injustice of nearly 15,000 of our citizens in this rich country living in emergency accommodation?

Seán Sherlock (Cork East, Labour)
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Hear, hear.

Ivana Bacik (Dublin Bay South, Labour)
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Hear, hear.

Gerald Nash (Louth, Labour)
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Some 20% of kids, one in five children in this country, have to go without a new winter coat this year, yet more was written over the summer about the tax implications for a tiny number of families who stand to inherit businesses than how a party that promised two years ago to fix child poverty might consign that scandal to history. The Minister, Deputy Burke, spent most of the spring and summer leaning on the independent Low Pay Commission to cool the jets on the delivery of a living wage for the lowest paid workers in this country. That is all we need to know about where Fine Gael is at at the moment. That was not always the case. Why is it that every small win for working people in this country is framed by Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil as a loss for business? That is not social democracy. That is not the kind of country I believe in and for which I want to fight. It is virtue signalling at its very worst, from a conservative Government that has chosen sides and is damn proud of it. This is a Government that has chosen sides, and it is proud of it, boxing off Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil voters while poor kids, the lowest income families and poor public services will have to wait.

This budget should have given all families and children the hope of a better future. It should have truly rewarded work by using our wealth, not merely to cut taxes but to cut the cost of childcare, healthcare and education and deliver a real social wage, the thing that really matters for families and working people across this country. It should have heralded the radical step change demanded to build the homes we need. It should have delivered the massive investment we need to make homes warm, invest in renewables and cut emissions. It should have finally decided that, together as a country, we would fix the tattered social contract - the idea that if you work hard and play by the rules, you will get on in life. This budget is the last of this Government's five and it has delivered a resounding "No" on all fronts.

Today could have marked a real turning point, the day when Ireland started a journey of real transformation. I cannot remember the number of times I heard the Minister for Finance use the word "transformation" or similar words. He did not mean a single word of it. The fiscal decision is stunning but this Government's plans are not. This is a country that is swimming in cash, but this is a budget for the status quo, straight out of the Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil "Sure, it will be grand" school of government. Even when we lock away excess business tax receipts, the Apple tax stash and the money from selling a stake in AIB, the surplus is striking. Today is an extraordinary missed opportunity. It is a missed chance to properly paint a picture of a better future. It provides €10 billion in new spending, €6 billion to the two new wealth funds, which we support, and, to top it all off, over €14 billion in an unexpected windfall to spend on future-proofing our country. Yet, with this budget, the Government has managed to make all this look like a problem, not an opportunity. That is one hell of a trick to pull off. It is a budget with no central theme in which nothing adds up. There is no compelling narrative and no ideas, no plan and no burning desire to put our wealth to good, responsible use. If there is a plan, this is just not it.

The eye-watering corporation tax gains have taken the Government by surprise like rabbits caught in the headlights. The seeds of much of the largesse we are reaping today were sewn many years ago, helped by the Labour Party. This bonanza fell into the Government’s lap. The Minister, Deputy Chambers, was described on “Morning Ireland” today as being a jammy Minister for Finance. “Jammy” is a word that, unfortunately, is underused. It is a great word. It is true that he is jammy, and more power to him, but whereas he needed to use this opportunity wisely, he did not.

Fine Gael tells us constantly that it is the party of responsible economic and fiscal management. It is not, and the evidence shows that. This Government’s record shows that claims of responsible management of the people’s money are wholly unwarranted. I say that for three reasons. Although completely made up to pretend that Fine Gael could let Fianna Fáil back into the house without burning it down, the Government keeps breaking its own 5% spending rule. It will now be a heady 6.9% for 2025. Last year, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil knowingly introduced a health budget that was fraudulent. It was a work of fiction. Only in Ireland would a health Minister responsible for a fictional and fraudulent budget manage to remain in his job. He should have resigned or been sacked. The fiscal gimmickry goes on unabated. Another €4.5 billion was hidden away, described as “contingencies”, and the Government pretends to be taken by surprise every year.

Housing is the greatest workers’ rights and economic issue we face, yet we are seeing the same old tired policies that have driven prices and rents higher and higher, resulting in 4,500 children being without a home in August. This Government lacks the ambition and willpower to build enough homes. Ideology is again getting in the way. For once, the Government does not lack financial firepower. The lack of imagination to transform the housing system is amazing and galling. When plan A fails, Darragh O’Brien resorts to plan A. As the Housing Commission's report reads, "Only a radical strategic reset of housing policy will work." What is the solution for the next few years? To listen to the Minister, Deputy O’Brien, it is to extend the help-to-buy scheme. He wanted to increase its limit to more than €500,000, supercharging expensive homes rather than actually addressing the affordability question.

For generations, developers have been happy to accumulate sites and sit on them. The residential zoned land tax was the measure we were told would stop that, but it is being delayed again. There is no evidence basis for that, only an ideological one, with the Government looking after the people who vote for it. The tax is being fudged. This is a peculiar fudge. When I read the Minister’s remarks, I was taken by how all a farmer who was actively farming land needed to do was to seek an exemption – the farmer would not actually need to get one – and then it would be left up to local authorities, which will only ever dezone or rezone lands under master plans and county development plans that are developed every five years. Will we have a map of exempted sites? What criteria will apply? If land is serviced and zoned for homes, it must be built on. We have no difficulty with exemptions for farm land, but they need to be transparent.

I do not need to remind the Minister of State of the Kenny report, but I will remind her that Labour introduced a Bill to legislate for it in 2021, largely down to the work done in this space by my colleague, Deputy Kelly. We now have the financial firepower to buy up the development sites we have invested in across the country. Let us legislate for the Kenny report and resource the LDA to step in and buy the sites we need. Then we can change the model of development once and for all and build homes in a planned and orderly way when and where they are needed. Private housing supply is being drip-fed into the system at just high enough of a rate to keep it ticking over, but nowhere near high enough to make a dent in the profits of developers and builders. To too many in the sector, housing is seen as an asset to buy and sell, not somewhere to live and raise a family. We need to stop the commodification of housing. The market is doing exactly what the Government’s ideology has set it up to do, namely, create more wealth for asset holders while renters and those trying to have a home of their own get screwed over time and again.

Once again, the Government has made choices. These things do not happen by accident. The Government’s plans for building social and affordable housing raise serious questions. Why are plans still limited to building 10,000 social homes and only 6,400 affordable homes next year? We have the ability, space and capacity to do more, change people’s lives and give people security once and for all. We can build more cost-rental and truly affordable homes. However, the Government is limiting the amount of capital it allocates. The plans for next year are what we in Labour proposed in 2021, and we even admitted then that it would not be enough. That is why Labour has outlined costed plans to bring the targets up to 12,000 social and 10,000 affordable homes per year. It is why we have committed half of the Apple windfall to transforming the Land Development Agency, an initiative that, unlike some others, we supported, into a State construction company to give the State real teeth in the housing market and to building the water infrastructure we need.

The latest wheeze that we read about this week – I am not certain that it found itself into the budget – had to do with measures to encourage living over the shop. We have been discussing this matter for many years. It is time to go back to the drawing board on these issues and do what we used to do. Resource councils with money and staff and they will take over vacant and derelict properties. Dereliction is a disgrace and scandal. It is a form of official vandalism, one almost encouraged by the State by the way we operate and the principle of the primacy of private land. Let us take on those vacant and derelict properties. I note the increase in the vacant levy, but it will be nowhere near enough to disincentivise the hoarding of vacant properties. Those properties need to be brought back into use.

Regarding homelessness, we know that evictions, not immigration, are driving the record levels of family homelessness. The Government will not act to restrict the excuses for eviction, but we know that the cost-rental tenant in situscheme works and allows families to stay in their homes. Across the country, Labour representatives are hearing about people being denied the chance to live securely under the tenant in situ scheme. There is clearly not enough funding dedicated to it. This is why Labour has proposed to increase it by 20% to 1,800 homes next year. Too much of homelessness funding is spent responding to crises when it is already too late. We need to invest in prevention.

A 5% increase in stamp duty will not stop bulk buying, which has increasingly been stripping homes from the market. Why not make it truly punitive? Who is the Government seeking to protect? Do what my colleague, Senator Sherlock, constantly asks the Government to do and extend the increase to apartments as well. Apartments are homes, too.

There is so much cash sloshing around that the Government does not know what to do with it. Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil have decided to give more tax cuts. That is the perennial Fine Gael answer to a question no one asks. If you cannot get your child an assessment of needs, here is a fiver instead. If you cannot get affordable childcare, here is another fiver and it will be grand. These are performative tax cuts when we need performing public services. Look at the polling. People favour public investment in housing, care, climate, education and public transport over the few euro of their own money the Government is planning on giving them back. Not even the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, the actual representative of working people, wants tax cuts. We need a decent social wage, one that is worthy of a wealthy republic, but we are instead seeing a race to the bottom between the Government parties and Sinn Féin on tax, not to mention on immigration. This never ends well. Who dares to speak of 2007?

I see Sinn Féin has a new policy to give all carers the carer’s allowance. That was dreamed up overnight to take the bare look off a subpar party leader conference speech. It is Labour’s policy; I do not believe it was in Sinn Féin’s alternative budget, which was launched last Thursday. As Sinn Féin’s embattled leader is prone to say, “Here is the thing” – the USC cut that Sinn Féin proposes would cost €2 billion. That is a full three years of non-means-tested carer’s allowance payments for some of the best and most isolated and underappreciated people in this country. With each day that passes with this approach to tax, immigration and whatever you are having yourself, Sinn Féin’s credibility as a self-described left-wing party becomes more discredited. For a left-wing party, Sinn Féin is quite something. It has rarely met a tax it believes is fair or it did not want to get rid of – USC, the local property tax, taxes on the burning of carbon that is killing the planet. The list goes on.

4 o’clock

The €500 million in the Fianna Fáil USC cut of 1% could pay for a full year of targeted child benefit payments to make child poverty history but no, they decided to have a tax cut instead. Labour has no issue with workers' pay going untouched in terms of income tax when they receive a pay rise - that additional piece in terms of the pay rise. That is as it should be. We would allocate €1 billion in a neutral way to do this just this year, but the ever-narrowing of the vulnerable tax base is irresponsible. The same people in the Department of Finance and elsewhere who warn us about the concentration risks of our business tax system - they are right - are the very ones who are supporting reckless decisions on tax here today. Every tax cut comes at a cost to someone. This Government will spend almost as much on tax cuts for next year as it will on new public services and on those who rely on the State for their incomes.

The obsession with cutting the thresholds for inheritance tax is a case in point. The Government will spend €88 million of the money that belongs to working people on giving an even more generous tax break to not only children, but to grandchildren too, of those who stand to inherit very valuable properties, and all in the middle of a housing crisis. I can only conclude that Alan Shatter is living in the head of the Minister of State, Deputy Carroll MacNeill. That is the cost of rolling out hot meals to every school in Ireland over the next five years. That is the Government's trade-off. This is where this Government's priorities are. They have made a choice. I understand the Government's argument, even if I disagree with it, but it is not consistent. House prices have gone up, then so must the threshold. That is the Government's logic. I get that. However, wages have gone up too, so why does the Government keep the cap on statutory redundancy for a worker who will lose his or her job at €600 per week and not move it to the €1,000 average it is at now? This has not been reviewed in 20 years. Where is the logic? The inconsistency is appalling. The Government has chosen a side and it is telling the 3% of households who will ever stand to benefit from inheritance tax threshold cuts all about it.

What Labour has made clear is that we would not introduce any unfunded tax cuts. There is scope to tax non-productive wealth such as increases to the bank levy and its application to more firms, greater stamp duty on share buy-backs, etc., to get the balance right and, crucially, to take the heat out of the economy. If I were a member of the Commission on Taxation and Welfare, I would be protesting outside here today because its calls for a rebalancing of the tax take with focus on taxing wealth and harmful behaviours has again fallen on deaf ears.

Let me turn now to once-off measures - the most abused term in recent Irish political history. Inflation is slowing but the price of everything is high, and I agree people still need some help. That we need a series of once-off measures at all is an indictment of this Government, an admission of failure that it did not spend what the dogs in the street knew was needed last October to bring weekly social welfare rates and secondary benefits up to scratch. That means the Minister is back now with the temporary bazooka of cash again. The Government needed to increase all core social welfare weekly rates by €25; it did €12. On Saturday, the Minister had €1.5 billion to lash out. Now, it is over €2 billion. On Sunday, the Minister decided he would give us all back more of our own money, and all because he just has not a clue how to spend and invest it. We truly live in extraordinary times. This explains, for example, the Minister's eleventh hour conversion to Labour's idea in our alternative budget of an extra child benefit double payment. That just was not on the agenda until the cash started burning a hole in the Government's pocket last weekend. It is fiscally wrong to keep going with once-off measures. The scattergun measures have, in fact, put a percentage point onto inflation adding an extra €1,000 a year of cost to households and it is those on low incomes who pay the price when costs go up. That is socially irresponsible. What we have in Ireland is a low incomes problem described by commentators as a cost-of-living crisis and this is exacerbated by a failure of regulation, huge energy prices and price gouging in supermarkets. The list goes on. Fine Gael said last year, for example, that it would legislate, after Labour's campaign, to introduce price transparency on groceries. They have not done so. We cannot keep lashing untargeted wads of cash at the problem, but what we can do is pay workers a living wage, get serious about regulating business, put toothless regulators on the side of consumers for once and fix our broken social protection system.

We must fix social protection. Society has accepted there should be a minimum essential standard of living for all citizens but this conservative Government has not. The nature of the internal coalition social welfare battle and pre-budget leaks were troubling. The arguments were described in the Sunday Independentas ideological. I hope they were. They should be. The fake hard men and women in Fine Gael were saying that pensioners and carers should get more of an increase than the unemployed. A warped version of Fine Gael ideology, the deserving poor versus the work shy, is, I suggest, their line for the news. It is dangerous and unbecoming stuff. It was trumped in the end, in fairness, by a bit of decency from Fianna Fáil and the Green Party - not enough decency, by the way, to provide for a pension that should be set at 34% of average earnings. When €20 increases are needed to maintain the value of the State pension, they give €12. There was a time when the old Fianna Fáil would not stand for this but they have drank the Fine Gael Kool-Aid on social welfare.

Where is the €25 cost of disability payment, for example, that Labour and others have argued for? This needs to be explained by a Minister who has limited resources available to her. There is now no difference worth talking about between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. They should just go and merge. Fine Gael says its position on a form of indexation for workers on income tax has moved to Labour's position. Their view on the indexation of social welfare rates has not, and it will not.

I must say my heart leaped when Leo Varadkar, on assuming the office of Taoiseach again two years ago, said he would work day and night to tackle the scourge of child poverty. That rhetoric led us to hope for a children's budget to end child poverty. Last year's budget was not it and neither is this. Everyone knows one cannot and should not break a problems to a child, but Fine Gael did. They have broken an earnest promise to the 30,000 children who have been added to the enforced deprivation statistics since Leo Varadkar made those hollow promises in December 2022. Every child inside that cage of poverty that is so hard to break free from need not become an adult shaped by the long tail and lasting effects and shame and stigma, and the physical and psychological long tail, of growing up with nothing. This can change. There are choices. The unit in the Department of the Taoiseach needs to be made real with a plan, cash and action. Last year the qualified child payment went up a mere €4 a week. Labour has argued that this year it should rise by €15 for over 12s and €6 for younger children, on our way to finally deciding to end the misery of absolutely preventable child poverty by fessing up and saying yes, let us spend €700 million a year on that second tier of child benefit. We welcome some of the moves made today. They should have been done last year. However, let us not just rebrand the qualified child payment as something else; make it matter. Let us agree that all children need every chance in life. Let us invest in DEIS plus. Let us invest in genuinely free education. Let us pass Labour's seven-year-old Bill to end family homelessness. Ending child poverty is within our grasp. It has to be a priority for the next Government and be an election issue. It is by no means a priority, though, in this budget. Let us fight an election on ending child poverty, not on ending the USC.

While we are on the subject of children, Labour, it must be said, is flattered by the Taoiseach's new-found interest in publicly-provided childcare. The problem is there is no sign of it in this budget. I cannot help thinking that the Taoiseach is using Government Buildings as a taxpayer-funded laboratory to road test manifesto ideas for Fine Gael. One journalist at the weekend bemoaned - he was right - the lack of big thinking in politics at present, but this is it - big thinking from the Labour Party leader, Ivana Bacik. It is the Niamh Bhreathnach or Donogh O'Malley moment, as it has been described, that we have been waiting for. Let us end the strange Irish exceptionalism that says we cannot have publicly-funded and publicly-run early years services staffed by skilled professionals in public buildings who are paid well and respected. We are Europeans or we are not. Labour would roll out 6,000 public childcare places in year one across 100 services at a first-year operating cost of €53 million. It can be done. This is the kind of transformational thinking absent from Government. There is no sign of it in the budget and no sign of any meaningful interventions to really bring costs down for parents. We are not serious about an equal start for all children and we are not serious about taking the economy to the next level if we are not serious about transforming our early years education system into the kind of system that is taken as read in comparable European countries.

Just like in childcare, the gaps in terms of skills and competitiveness in Ireland are huge. So are the challenges, especially in the SME sector.

If we are to sustain our economic success and be competitive, we have to invest in future skills, in work training and apprenticeships. I see there is only a 33% short-term cut in apprenticeship fees. Our PRSI levy-based National Training Fund is heading for a surplus of €2 billion, and that is a good thing. Now we see what the Government's plan is to fund third level. It seems it is to keep third level going by raiding that fund at the expense of other initiatives. We want to see free third level for everyone and we need to invest in in-work training too. We have no difficulty with taking some money from the National Training Fund to invest in third level, but it should not only be for third level.

Before handing over to my colleague, Deputy Duncan Smith, I note our view is that the parties of the status quoare simply incapable of fixing the problems we have. The evidence is all around us in housing, lack of progress in offshore wind, anaemic retrofitting programmes, creaking water services and an energy grid not able to meet our current or future demands. The Parliamentary Budget Office report produced last week was very interesting. It states that despite all of this largesse, this Government will invest less in infrastructure than we did in 2008. This is damning. At no point between now and 2030 will those spending plans come close to that 2008 figure. That is truly shocking. Ireland's second century must be an era of investment and that can only be led by parties that believe in their hearts, and know in their minds that only the power of the State has the capacity, the mandate and the authority to do the truly big things we need to see happen, that is, the things that can truly transform Ireland. I note what the Government stated earlier today about the use of money from AIB shares and the Apple tax. Labour will make its case to be part of the next Government, a Government that for once in our history, will have the capacity to truly transform Ireland. We have made it clear how we would deploy the Apple tax money. We have the courage of our convictions and the experience to do so. We would spend €7 billion on housing to seed a State housing construction company through the existing Land Development Agency, with €1 billion of that to support the water network to service land. There would be two-and-a-half billion euro to make major transformative transport projects such as metro, Luas, BusConnects and DART+ happen and €1 billion so the State could invest to make offshore wind generation happen, as well as cutting emissions, keeping homes warm and slashing energy prices and helping to create an industry and new sustainable jobs and businesses. We would fund a street-by-street retrofitting revolution that will matter and deploy €1 billion to create a Sláintecare transition fund, half of which Labour would use to roll out digital health records to make our health service work better for patients and staff alike. This is the level of ambition and clarity of purpose we need to truly change Ireland, an ambition that only Labour has.

Duncan Smith (Dublin Fingal, Labour)
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On behalf of the Labour Party, on a day when we discuss and debate, and scrabble over the many billions of euro we have in this country, our thoughts are with the innocents in Lebanon and Gaza and throughout the Middle East who are living in fear under a hail of drone, rocket and artillery fire as that war not only continues but escalates.

Ivana Bacik (Dublin Bay South, Labour)
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Hear, hear.

Duncan Smith (Dublin Fingal, Labour)
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The Government has done a remarkable job trying to frame this budget as a budget that has no losers and only winners, that it is a budget that will benefit everyone, particularly children and families. If we look beyond our shores economically, we can see that the three largest economies in Europe, namely, Germany, France and the UK, are facing gloomy economic predictions of varying degrees. What are we doing in Ireland with this budget? We are shrinking the tax base. We are inflating our spending and funding this through windfall taxes. That is what we are doing. We have been down this road before, and we know where it ends. This is a "when I have it, I’ll spend it" splurge of a budget, giving people back their own money in exchange for short-term votes and support. People will welcome any money that is going back into their pockets because no sooner is that in their pockets, it will be in the accounts of utility companies, the tills of supermarkets or used in trying to knock off a few bob from that credit union loan that had to be taken out just to get through the cost-of-living crisis people are still enduring. That is what this budget is doing. Where will the people who are supposed to benefit from this budget be in a couple of weeks' time or months' time? They will be in the exact same place they were yesterday, because that money will be gone to chase their tails.

The Government has positioned this budget to cover and help an awful lot of people and states it will only have winners. However, here are some losers. Nine-year-old children and above, who for their entire lives have benefited from the free GP care scheme will age out in massive numbers now, because Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil are not committed to free GP care, which was one of the greatest universalisations of healthcare in this country when it was first introduced by the Labour Party for those up to six years of age. It was only over the past eight years that two years were added. That has seemingly stopped. If you are a child on a waiting list for an autism class, this budget is of no use to you. It will not deliver any extra places or autism classes in any school in this country. There are just over 3,000 primary schools in our country. Only 1,000 of them provide autism classes. This budget does not rectify that in any real way, shape or form. If you are waiting for an assessment of need, about which there are some words in the Budget Statement, there is no detail because every budget delivered by this Government has had words about the assessment of needs waiting list. Yet, we still have huge waiting lists. Again, if you or your child is on that waiting list, they will remain on that waiting list because this budget will not help you. If you are waiting for speech and language therapy, OT or physiotherapy you will still be waiting because there is no detail in the delivery of the therapies and specialists needed to get those waiting lists down. If your child is waiting to be seen by CAMHS this budget will do nothing for you. If you are a medical card holder and currently unable to access dental treatment, this budget again has no detail that it is going to deliver for you. If you are a long-term carer about to lose your carer's allowance because your annual household income is marginally over the means test, this budget does nothing for you. That means test needs to go.

If you are a young worker hoping to enter one of our care professions in either a voluntary, community or acute setting this budget does nothing for you. I do not know if the Minister for Health, or any Minister or senior member of the Government was over in Buswells speaking to student nurses. They are referenced in the document, which says there will be more funding for student nurses. The issues with student nurses relate to their pay, to how they are working and that they have to take shifts as healthcare assistants, usually on the same wards where they are doing their student placement. When they are doing their healthcare assistant shifts, they are being asked to act up for nursing responsibilities, which means the very important job of healthcare assistant is not being done. This budget does not help that problem. What we needed was a workforce budget, a budget that was going to develop our workforce. That is not sexy or eye catching, but that is what this country needs.

Alan Kelly (Tipperary, Labour)
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Hear, hear - 100%.

Duncan Smith (Dublin Fingal, Labour)
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It is needed to help build, to help care, to help teach and to help deliver a public service.

Today, in our health service and hospitals there are 576 people on trolleys. Our trolley count is a crude, but powerful, indicator of the health of our health service, and 576 people on trolleys on the first day of October is a near record for the first day of this month. We need new staff but we also need to keep existing staff. They are overworked and underpaid. This is the reality of our healthcare workers and nothing in this budget is dealing with that fundamental problem. I acknowledge this budget document states there will be investment in a number of healthcare strategies, which is welcome. The cancer strategy, for example, has gone underfunded for a number of years. It requires €20 million but in this document, it is included with the stroke strategy - again, vitally needed - the maternity strategy, the women's health action plan, the dementia strategy, the breastfeeding strategy and the palliative care strategy. All these strategies need to be developed and funded. There is no detail on the funding for these strategies. These are not documents that stay on a shelf and do nothing. Strategies in these areas help deliver healthcare and help save and prolong lives.

The absence of a strategy, such as the absence of a cancer strategy, means people suffering with cancer are not getting access to clinical trials. We are at 50% of the level of clinical trials in Denmark, for example. We are so far behind in that regard and that is because we are not funding those strategies. Will the Government please provide the detail, the funding and the strategies? We are failing behind.

My colleague, Deputy Nash, spoke about the investment in electronic health records. Again, this is something that will really deliver healthcare outcomes. It will stop the need for repeated X-rays and repeated therapies, the duplication or tripling of work, and will actually ensure timely diagnostics and delivery of healthcare. This should not be long-fingered.

Regarding the hot school meals programme, this is one of the best things the Government has done. It is brilliant. I am glad it is being extended. What I like about it is, not only does it do what it says on the tin and makes sure every child that gets it is getting a hot school meal, but it is egalitarian. These pupils, these kids, are sharing the same experience. There is no difference. A son or daughter of privilege is having the same meal or at least getting something from the same menu as the son and daughter of a parent in direct provision. That is a good thing. We are a bit concerned with the holiday hunger pilot project next summer. It is not about the actual scheme itself. It should be rolled out but calling it the holiday hunger scheme lacks a bit of compassion. It takes away from what is good about the hot school meals scheme. Call it the summer meals scheme or call it something else. These children know better than anyone else that they are hungry. They will not need a scheme named that or see it printed on a box. Will the Minister of State take that point away? That kind of compassion is something that is needed.

On transport, this budget is so devoid of vision and ambition. We have thousands of people who are waiting at bus stops and on platforms for buses that are not turning up and trains that do not have enough carriages. The problem is not just a timetable change; it is capacity, tracks, carriages, buses, workers and drivers. We do not have them and this budget is not going to deliver them in the slightest. This budget will deliver a shrinking of our tax base and an increase in spending and is doing it with windfall taxes. It is bringing our economy to a place that is precarious. Best of luck to the Government on these economics outlooks that will be put in the budget documents over the next five or six year. Hopefully, they will be delivered.

Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour)
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Soft landings.

Duncan Smith (Dublin Fingal, Labour)
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We have never had soft landings before. The way the Government is setting this country up means we will fall hard, maybe harder than we have ever fallen in the past. I will leave that there as I am running out of time.

The Government is really playing fast and loose with our finances and with the country's economy. This budget is not as glossy, as shiny or as helpful to the ordinary people of Ireland whose children are on waiting lists, who are on waiting lists themselves, who cannot get to work or to college on time, who are hungry and do not have enough money to pay their bills, who are in housing distress and who are paying huge rents. Nothing in this budget is going to fix that, no matter how it is spun or what is said on debate shows tonight or in the following days. The people will know that and whether this election is in three weeks or three months, they will cast a judgment on this Government. There are winners and losers in this country. There are more losers than you think and this budget is not helping them.

Róisín Shortall (Dublin North West, Social Democrats)
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I wish to share time with my colleague, Deputy Cian O'Callaghan.

The budget will be remembered as one of missed opportunities. It is kind of like a giveaway on steroids and is certainly grabbing the headlines; there is no doubt about that. We have lots of breathless reporting of the gargantuan surplus figure, that €25 billion, and the complex array of one-off measures. However, looking a little deeper, it quickly becomes clear that the emperor has no clothes. Never has a Government had so much and done so little. Plenty of cash has been splashed around but mainly in one-off measures. All of these payments will certainly be very welcome, particularly at this time of year, but they will not last very long. What happens then? When happens when the bonus payments dry up and prices are continuing to rise? Will homes be any more affordable? Will rents come down at all? Will healthcare be easier to access? Will childcare places be affordable or more available? Will disability services for children with additional needs be more accessible? Will older people be better supported to live at home? Will child poverty be seriously reduced? We also have to ask will the huge inequality that exists in our society be addressed in any meaningful way? Will we be any closer to meeting our climate targets? Will any of it make any long-term positive difference? Will the country work any better? The answer, in the main, is "No". This budget has just one overriding purpose, that is, the self-preservation of the Government parties. A whole plethora of one-off payments are set to be made just before, or during, when we all expect a general election. It is a bit on the nose, even for this spin-obsessed Government. You does not need to be Sherlock Holmes to work out the rationale behind all of this.

I read recently that the Taoiseach met the former Fianna Fáil leader, Bertie Ahern, in recent days. He invited him in to Government Buildings for a fireside chat. That is also quite instructive because this has all the hallmarks of a Bertie budget. Spray money around, create a distraction and hope that it is enough to win an election. However, I do not think people are that easily fooled. The Government is underestimating them. People can see that what the Government is trying to do is textbook electioneering, that is, to use people's own money to buy their votes. Worse, the Government is selling people short. Essentially, all they are getting is a few extra quid in their pockets, which will quickly be gobbled up in cost-of-living increases. It is a bad deal for the public and for the State finances. We all know the only way to significantly drive down costs for everyone is by investing in proper public services. We need to ensure people, all through their lives, have a strong social safety net through which no one is allowed to fall. We need genuinely free education, affordable housing, accessible healthcare, reliable public transport, affordable childcare and strong social care delivered in the community. Imagine for a moment what the country could look like were the social contract to be honoured and not left in tatters, as the Government is doing. That is the kind of vision and ambition we need in this country but it is not, by any means, what this Government has delivered. Regrettably, the Government prefers quick fixes instead of structural reforms and it is really shameful that, yet again, it has failed to target measures at those who need them most. The energy credits are the most stark example of this. These will be going to many people who do not actually need them, just as in previous years. After today's announcement, how much of this State largesse will have been funnelled to the owners of holiday homes? The answer is more than €90 million. In comparison, the Government ring-fenced only €19 million for spinal surgeries for children with scoliosis, which it could not even ensure was used for that purpose.

This is the Ireland of today, under this Government, where children on long waiting lists live in agony for years, with their health deteriorating while resources are frittered away elsewhere. They are frittered away on bonus payments and energy credits for the wealthiest in our society, heaped on top of the bonfire of public money that is the endless budget for the children’s hospital, or spent on a bike shed that cost nearly €350,000, a security hut for €1.5 million or €500,000 modular homes. Not only is the Government engaged in a spending splurge unlike any other, but any value-for-money considerations have been left at the door.

I want to talk about some of the measures in the budget or, to be more precise, some of the glaring absences from this document. I will start with child poverty. We were told that eradicating child poverty was a priority for the Government, as the Minister of State may remember. At least, that is what the former Taoiseach, Deputy Leo Varadkar, said. He even published a plan in 2023, From Poverty to Potential: A Programme Plan for Child Poverty and Well-being. What actually happened? The number of children experiencing deprivation actually increased by 15% in the last year. One in five children is now living in a home where the family cannot afford to heat the home or afford two pairs of properly fitting shoes. Those on the Government benches, who were grinning from ear to ear earlier, should pause for a moment and think about that. On their watch, more children have fallen below the poverty line. The record budget surpluses do not mean anything to them because they have not benefited from all of this funding. The reason is simple. The Government has failed to target it at those who need it most. It ignored all of the expert advice - from the Children’s Rights Alliance, the St. Vincent de Paul, the ESRI and others - and preferred to spray money indiscriminately rather than direct it to those who need it most.

In 2023, a welfare payment that goes to the State’s most vulnerable children was increased by a miserly €2 a week. Last year, that figure was increased to just €4. This year, the Government has managed an increase of €8 but it is not nearly enough. In our alternative budget, the Social Democrats proposed increasing this rate by €15, nearly double the Government’s paltry figure. We did that because those children desperately need this support. We also proposed a range of other measures, like a public model of childcare, increased childcare subsidies for the most disadvantaged children, a new DEIS+ categorisation for schools and an increase in the threshold of the working family payment of €40.

I do not see much of that in this document. Instead, everyone - the richest families and the poorest - get largely the same child supports and two double child benefit payments. I listened to the Minister, Deputy Humphreys, explaining the rationale for this on the “This Week” programme on RTÉ radio on Sunday, and I have to say that I was quite appalled by her. She made some reference to Christmas coming up and parents being under pressure to buy toys because of all the catalogues coming in the letterbox. Did she not listen before she spoke to the clip where parents of children with disabilities were crying out for basic specialist services? Does she not realise that, for some parents, the biggest struggle is not to buy the latest toy? It is to keep a roof over their children’s heads, make a choice between heating their home or cooking a meal, or buy a winter coat or new shoes. The level of disconnection from the reality of many people’s lives is extraordinary. What kind of bubble is the Government living in? Does the real world ever get a look in? We all know, or at least we should know, that the first few years of a child’s life can largely determine the rest of it. If we get those early years right, so much harm later in life can be avoided. Is it just that this Government cannot be bothered to target these resources or is it that it is so obsessed with trying to buy the next election that it no longer cares about those important things?

We see the same stubborn refusal to tackle low pay. Ireland has a real problem with low pay. Hundreds of thousands of people subsist week to week on incomes that are not sufficient to live a dignified existence. Included in this number are the one fifth of workers who were promised by the Government that a living wage would be introduced by 2026. Where does that commitment lie now, given we are nowhere near delivering on it? I did not see any reference to it in the budget bonanza. If the Government wanted to make a genuine effort to reach that target, it needed a much bigger minimum wage increase than the 80 cent announced today. The Social Democrats proposed an increase of €1.30 to €14 per hour and committed to replacing the minimum wage with a living wage in next year’s budget.

Increases to core social welfare rates, well above the €12 announced today, should also have been a priority. Instead of adequately increasing core rates and helping people in the long term, the Government reverted to its preferred approach of short-termism and one-offs. For months now, we have heard figures being bandied about in relation to social welfare increases, and figures from €10 to €20 were cited. However, despite endless commentary, I never saw any analysis of what the appropriate figure should be for such increases. Social welfare increases should not just be at the discretion of individual Ministers. They should be taken out of the hands of politicians altogether and benchmarked to the minimum essential standard of living. To do that, a weekly increase of €48 needs to be delivered over a reasonable period. If we were in government, the Social Democrats would have charted a course to get there over two years, and we proposed to start with a €25 per week increase this year. This would make a huge difference to those who are most at risk of poverty - pensioners, lone parents, disabled people and those who have lost their jobs. Again, however, the Government preferred half-measures. After some cynical politicking from Fine Gael and attempting to vilify those who have lost their jobs as somehow unworthy of support, the rate is increasing by just €12 per week across the board. It is a figure that has seemingly been plucked out of the sky by the coalition partners because it sounds a bit better than a tenner. Optics and arbitrariness are the Government's key concerns when framing the budget.

I will move on to the tax package. If there is a theme running through the tax measures in this budget, it is this: the more you have, the more you get from this Government. Those earning €75,000 will benefit in this budget to the tune of €20 per week while those barely scraping by on €30,000 will get €5 per week. Equity and fairness are entirely absent. What we have seen in recent budgets from the Government is that very principle, the more you have, the more you get. The net result is that the gap between rich and poor has widened. We have become less equal and less cohesive as a society and, therefore, less successful. Instead of disproportionately heaping benefits at the top, the Social Democrats proposed an alternative, namely, increasing tax credits by €450 and making them refundable so the benefit was shared equally. This approach would have cost the State much less, just one-third of the Government’s tax package.

Income tax is not the only area, of course, but it is essential that we do not erode the tax base that we have.

The Government has been warned of that by various agencies, yet it continues to erode the tax base year after year.

This is not the only area where the Government is looking after the better off. In fact, it could be said it is the only part of the budget where the Government made a real effort to target support. The increase in the threshold for inheritance tax is very targeted at a wealthy minority because the vast majority of people will never have to pay inheritance tax, despite scaremongering to the contrary. The idea that children inheriting a house might have to sell their home or face homelessness to pay the charge is bogus, as fair exemptions are already in place for to avoid this. Inheritance is not earned; it is received based on an accident of birth, yet we give it greatly favourable tax treatment when compared to productive activities like work. We do not tax wealth very much in Ireland; now we will tax it even less. Fewer than 3% of households ever receive an inheritance greater than the old threshold of €335,000. Now even fewer will pay inheritance tax and it is the better off who are being spared.

Gold-plated pension pots is also an area that has seen an intervention from this Government. It has moved to ensure that pension pots in excess of €2 million will not face a tax penalty. This is yet another targeted measure to benefit less than 1% of our population. Just like with inheritance tax, it seems that a well-publicised lobbying campaign getting blanket media coverage has done the trick. Soundbites and a misrepresentation of data,have proven more influential on policy than any kind of sound analysis.

We can get one thing straight: any suggestion that anyone would end up financially worse-off from taking promotions, if the standard fund threshold for pensions were not increased, is wrong. People whose pension benefits cross the threshold might face higher marginal rates, not higher overall rates, but those apply solely on the amount over the threshold, which was an already generous €2 million. This is an amount only a tiny fraction of people can ever hope to save for their retirement. Nobody would be worse off. Candidates will indeed get higher pensions. They were simply facing higher rates of tax than they expected or were lobbying for. All this move represents is an underhanded way of giving extra money to the highest paid civil servants in the country. I just wonder how many of those higher-paid civil servants had a hand in devising this change in policy. This gives an additional tax break that will be worth more than €300,000 per person to some of the best paid people in the private sector by 2030.

I also want to say something about tax proposals from Sinn Féin. It is important to refer to what Sinn Féin is proposing because the Government parties are not the only ones with big tax packages in their budgets. Sinn Féin’s alternative budget outlined a tax package worth an enormous €2 billion. Sinn Féin has flagged plans to scrap the property tax, the carbon tax and to cut the universal social charge, USC. That is quite cynical and very hard to understand from a party that claims to be left wing. It is very cynical because one cannot promise to radically improve public services and slash taxes at the same time. People are not that stupid. They get that, even if some in this House fail to understand that. Our public services desperately need investment. We cannot repeat the mistakes of the past and bet the house on transient corporation tax windfalls that could disappear at some point in the not-too-distant future.

The need for investment is particularly acute in disability services. As it stands, 15,000 children are waiting for their first contact from a children’s disability network team. Tens of thousands more of those children are being denied essential services. That is a shameful indictment of the Government’s term of office. The most vulnerable left on waiting lists are denied critical supports to live a life with dignity and to have any chance of realising their full potential. This is all happening while enormous sums slosh around in the Government coffers.

If the Social Democrats were in government, disability services would have more than ten times the investment that has been flagged by the Government because this is a sector that really needs it and we can afford to do it. Included in our priorities in this area is a €30 per week cost-of-disability payment. This would be on top of the €25 increase in disability payment. This would mean that core payments made to disabled people would increase by €55 per week. Compare that to the €12 announced with great fanfare by the Government.

This level of increase is necessary because having a disability is very expensive. The Government published a report in 2021 that put the figure at an additional annual €13,100. Why did it bother commissioning that research if it was not going to do anything about it? It is yet another report sitting on a shelf gathering dust somewhere rather than being implemented. The Government has done virtually nothing to address the enormous additional costs faced by disabled people. One-off disability payments are not sufficient. Having a disability is not one-off or temporary and the Minister of State should not need to be reminded of that. Why then are these payments being made? The Government’s dismissive attitude to disabled people is perhaps best reflected in the fact that personal transport schemes that were axed by the Fine Gael-Labour Government a decade ago have yet to replaced. That says it all. That level of inertia and ineptitude is quite shocking. We all know that disabled people are more likely to suffer from isolation and poverty. One in five people unable to work due to disability live in consistent poverty. This is almost four times higher than the national average. Where are the measures in this budget to address that scandal? I do not see any and that is absolutely shameful.

I have also looked through this document to find the measures that will deliver affordable homes but they seem to be missing too. Of course, that is mainly because the Government persists with the delusion that homes costing €500,000 are somehow affordable. When starting out with that bizarre perspective, there is no hope of addressing the affordability crisis in any kind of meaningful way. My colleague Deputy O’Callaghan will speak about housing in a great deal more depth shortly.

When it comes to the health service, I am glad to see that the Government has opted not to run that service next year with an enormous built-in deficit just as it did last year, which the House will recall. It is incredible that last year the budget contained a €1.5 billion black hole in health. The budget for the health service is large and we must ensure accountability but a reform programme costs money and investment now will pay dividends in the future. As it stands, there are too many who cannot access health services when they need them. There are too many people on lengthy waiting lists for treatment. There are too few primary care centres working in communities. The scandal of tens of thousands of people languishing on trolleys persists. Critical programmes, such as the cancer strategy, have been starved of funding and regional disparities in the availability of acute care continue. This also applies to home care supports.

We cannot stand over a situation in which the midwest region is denied the resources in funding and staff that are available elsewhere.

It was intriguing to hear the Minister, Deputy Donohoe, speak earlier when he referred to an increase in health staffing levels to over 130,000 staff. The current approved staff ceiling, however, is 129,753. It sounds very strange. By how many people are we actually going to increase the childcare staff? Increases in capacity at primary care level are especially important. I would like to hear from the Government what exactly they are talking about. How much over 130,000 does it intend going? Key to that is how many over 130,000 is the Government prepared to fund?

One has to ask why this Government cannot take the long view and tackle the kind of fundamental problems that are facing this country. Instead, the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that these surpluses represent are wasted in this budget, mainly because of ephemeral, one-off payments. Why has the Government wasted those opportunities? We were in a position to do something of real consequence in relation to services in this country, to make it a more united country, to make it a fairer country, and to make it a more cohesive country. The Government has wasted those opportunities.

So many people are again being left behind in this budget when they should have been the priority. When the dust settles on the splurge and when the one-off payments have been spent where will it leave us? I ask people to think ahead to next February or March. Will any of the major issues we are facing as a society such as housing, healthcare, disability services, climate action, inequality, or the lack of accountability, be better? Regrettably, I believe the answer to that question is a resounding "No". This budget is the ultimate in short-termism. It is a cynical, blatant and reckless attempt to buy votes on the cheap and to hell with the consequences that appear. Truly this is a Bertie budget. It is a Bertie budget for the ages.

Cian O'Callaghan (Dublin Bay North, Social Democrats)
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Never before has the opportunity or the need for action from Government to address the housing crisis been so great and never before has the opportunity for Government to address the housing crisis been so great. The Housing Commission in its report published in May stated very clearly that we need 60,000 new homes a year to be delivered. Currently only about half of that is being delivered. This budget presented the Government with a great and golden opportunity to take radical and decisive action to ensure we get enough housing, and particularly affordable housing, that is desperately needed in this country. There is a generation watching on today who are stuck at home in their childhood bedrooms. This generation is absolutely horrified at a Government that has failed to grasp this moment and this opportunity. This budget is a real kick in the teeth for renters who are paying exorbitant rents, for every adult stuck in his or her childhood bedroom, and for every person who is currently experiencing homelessness or who is in fear of becoming homeless.

The context of this budget for housing and for renters is that when Fine Gael took office initially someone looking to rent a place faced paying an average rent of €757. Now the average rent has risen to a whopping €1,612. Since this Government has taken office house prices have increased by more than €80,000. Home ownership is at its lowest level in more than 50 years. Back in 1991 Ireland had one of the highest home ownership rates in Europe at about 80%. In just 30 years that has fallen to 66% and is continuing to fall. At the same time the Government continues to subsidise and encourage expensive rental-only developments that are owned by international funds where there is no option at all for people to buy. This is a direct result of what the Government is doing, and indeed what it is failing to do.

There are now 14,486 people who are homeless and living in emergency accommodation. When Fine Gael took office this number was still too high but it was 3,808. This is a 280% increase since Fine Gael has taken office. Rough sleeping in Dublin in the last year, not including the numbers of international protection applicants, has increased by 56% under this Government. Child homelessness has reached record levels and yet the Minister, Deputy Donohoe, told us earlier that this Government wants Ireland to be one the best countries in the world to be a child. If the Government is serious about that it could start by tackling child homelessness and eliminating child homelessness but we do not see measures in the budget to do this.

When we talk of all these numbers it is important to remember there are humans behind these numbers. Last week I attended an event organised by the Simon Community. I met two people who had previously been homeless, had come out of that, and are now in housing. They talked of the trauma they experienced in homeless emergency accommodation and how they will never recover from that. They spoke of how every week they count themselves lucky to be alive and how utterly traumatised and scarred they were by the experience of having no personal space, of not having proper support and care, and of feeling constantly under threat. These are just two of the people behind the staggering numbers this Government is responsible for. All of this is happening in the context of a budget surplus of €25 billion that could be used to end homelessness and to build the tens of thousands of affordable social homes that we desperately need to fix this housing crisis. There are more than enough resources available to fully fund the Social Democrats affordable housing plan, which would see us build 50,000 affordable-purchase homes over the next few years, in addition to what can be delivered in social housing and by private housing delivery. There is simply no excuse not to tackle the housing crisis in this budget and yet the Government has failed to do this.

On the specific measures in this budget, the pathetic 5% increase in stamp duty announced by the Government on the bulk purchase of homes shows it is simply not serious about tackling this at all and does not want to stamp out the practice of multi-billion euro funds snapping up homes, pushing up prices and pushing out first time buyers. For example, we saw this happening earlier this year in my constituency in Belcamp Manor where 85% of the new homes were snapped up by a fund. What action did the Government take at that time? None at all. It has taken them all year to come up with a paltry 5% increase in stamp duty, which they know will not be effective. It is worth remembering that this stamp duty applies to funds which buy homes that are already built and already exist. These are homes that could and should have been made available to individuals and families to buy. Last year we saw a 56% increase in the number of homes bought up by these funds paying the ineffective stamp duty rate. It shows yet again that the Government is not serious about tackling this and that the Government is on the side of the funds not the side of those people who are desperately trying to find an affordable place to live.

This budget also fails to take any action on the large subsidies and tax subsidies in place for international funds and investors. This is especially the case when it comes to the tax subsidies that international funds and REITs enjoy. Let us be very clear that favourable tax treatment for these funds is a subsidy. That is what it is. The situation is that REITs pay no capital gains tax, no corporation tax and no tax on the rental income. International investors and funds who are investing into REITs pay virtually no tax at all in this State while extracting huge profits from rental incomes. This highly favourable tax regime for international investors is unjust.

5 o’clock

It is a slap in the face for every Irish worker who contributes, through taxation, to fund our public services. The Social Democrats proposed a levy on REITs to ensure that they would at least make some contribution towards our services with the profits they make. Is there another country in the world that subsidises large international funds in this way to provide very expensive rental accommodation? I do not believe there is. Other countries put their subsidies and supports into affordable housing to make sure there is more available for people. It is no wonder that, under this Government, rents, house prices and rates of homelessness have never been higher given that it is subsidising funds that are making huge profits by extracting very high rents.

Part of the sweetheart deals is how the Government backs long-term leasing deals as a further subsidy to these funds. In today's budget there was no fanfare from the Government on this. It was just buried in the detail. We have seen the Government breaking the commitment it gave over the last few years on long-term leasing. Time and again, the Government has told us it is winding down long-term leasing, these sweetheart deals that ensure that, over 20 or 30 years, the State pays the entire cost of financing a home yet leaves the investment fund with full ownership at the end. This is incredibly bad value for money but, of course, we have come to expect this from the Government. It is not interested in value for money. It has presided over a bike shed being built that cost more than a new home. Value for money seems to mean nothing to this Government. We were promised that these sweetheart leasing deals would be wound down, yet today the Government announces 7,400 new long-term leasing deals over the next year. This is on top of the 38,000 long-term leasing deals the State has already signed up for. This measure is simply a bailout for developers doing projects that are otherwise not viable to build. What the State should be doing is buying these sites that are not viable and building social and affordable housing on them instead. The approach being taken by the Government is the worst possible in terms of value for money. In 20 or 30 years, when these loans have been paid off by the taxpayer, we will not own a single one of these homes. This bankrolling of developers and bailing out of speculators with these sweetheart deals simply cannot be justified.

The vacant homes tax increase from 0.51% to 0.72% is pathetic and will not act as a deterrent to anyone sitting on a property and watching its value increase by about 10% per year by doing nothing. It is yet another half-hearted measure by the Government to make it look like it is doing something about the housing crisis. As we have been saying repeatedly, we need a vacancy tax with teeth to bring thousands of vacant homes back into use. In our alternative budget, the Social Democrats proposed a vacancy tax of 10%, which would be effective. It is time to stop fiddling around with tiny increases year after year and to take the housing, homelessness and vacancy crises seriously.

On housing adaptation grants, I welcome the Government announcement that the income threshold and maximum grant will increase. Housing adaptation grants are an excellent support to help people to stay in their homes and continue to live independently. They are very good for people's well-being and health. That being said, these measures are long overdue. The grants have failed to keep up with significant levels of housing construction inflation. The review into housing adaptation grants was due to be published before the end of 2022. Why has it taken the Government two years to act on this? Was it simply holding back on this decision and much-needed announcement because it wanted to announce some good news a few weeks before an election was called?

It is not simply a question of the thresholds and maximum grants. The number of grants being awarded needs to be looked at. The Government funded fewer housing adaptation grants in 2024 than in 2010. What has happened between 2010 and 2024? There has been a huge increase in the number of people aged 65 and over, with a rise of almost 300,000 people in the last 14 years. The fact that fewer grants are now being awarded is highly significant and the Government should be tackling it. There are significant waiting lists for the housing adaptation grants. People simply cannot wait. If someone needs a chair-lift to get up and down stairs and stay in their home, they should not be left waiting. The Department gave a commitment in 2019 to publish data about waiting lists. We are still waiting on that commitment to be honoured. We know that information published by ALONE under the Freedom of Information Act showed several local authorities with significant waiting lists. ALONE estimates that up to 5,000 people are affected. We need an increase in the number of grants awarded and we need the information about the waiting lists to be published and for measures to be taken on this issue.

Never before has the opportunity for a Government to fix our housing crisis been so great. Never before has the need been so great, with record rents, house prices, numbers of people living in homeless emergency accommodation and record numbers of children growing up without a home. Never before has the need been so great and never before have so many resources been available to tackle this and has such an opportunity to tackle this been squandered. The Government had an open goal to take action on the housing crisis in this budget. Not only has it failed to get the ball into the back of the net, it appears the Government is not even on the pitch when it comes to fixing the housing crisis.

Seán Ó Fearghaíl (Kildare South, Ceann Comhairle)
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Are you sharing time with colleagues, Deputy Boyd Barrett?

Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)
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Yes, I am sharing time with Deputies Paul Murphy and Mick Barry.

The Government has unprecedented resources at its disposal that could have delivered a transformative budget to resolve the housing catastrophe the country is facing, address the crisis in the health service and the cost-of-living crisis and eradicate poverty. Instead of doing that, it has given us a splurge of one-off measures to buy a general election and next year, we will be back where we started. That is the reality of this budget. The Government is trying to dazzle people with one-off measures without dealing with the disastrous crisis we face in housing and homelessness, in health, with the cost of living and with the poverty and inequality that exist in our society. The Government had the resources to do this.

The most shocking failure is in the area of housing, which is the mother of all crises we face and which has impacts on so many different levels. This is about the housing misery and hardship that more than 14,000 people face in homelessness, the well over 100,000 households that have been on housing waiting lists for a decade and, in some cases, two decades for a social home, the tens of thousands of young, working people who can never hope to afford their own home or the many tens of thousands who are paying extortionate rents. With all the resources at its disposal, the Government has done nothing in this budget to address the housing catastrophe we face. Even I am shocked at its failure on housing.

Incredibly, after the Housing Commission said we needed to double our housing output, which means at least doubling social and affordable housing output, the Government figures for social and affordable housing for next year announced in today's budget are the same as those for this year. There has been no change from the Housing for All plan, which has failed disastrously. Last year, the target was 10,000 social homes and 6,000 affordable homes. The target next year is 10,000 social homes and 6,000 affordable homes. There has been no change. That is absolutely incredible. The Government is planning to put an additional €4 billion on top of what it has just put into the Future Ireland Fund and the infrastructure fund before the end of year instead of putting that money into doubling the amount of social and affordable housing to be delivered, which is what is needed next year and for at least five or ten years afterwards. That is absolutely stunning. It explains why the Government refused for six months to discuss the Housing Commission's report. It refused point-blank because the consequences of actually having a discussion on it would have been to admit that, as the commission has outlined, the Housing for All plan accounts for less than half of what is necessary to deliver a solution to the absolutely catastrophic housing and homelessness crisis, which is getting worse by the day and which requires us to at least double social and affordable housing output.

There is no action in the budget to deal with the unaffordable rents being charged. These are now well over €2,000 a month. There is a paltry increase in the tax credit but all of this is money going into the pockets of corporate landlords while rents are racing upwards. It will make no difference. It will just about keep people at the same level of extortionate rent they are already at. What is necessary is for us to cut rents or to deliver social and affordable housing on the scale necessary to allow people not to be dependent on these vulture funds and corporate landlords, which are charging rents that no reasonable person could be expected to pay or afford.

There is no action to deal with unaffordable house prices. Whatever additional money is going into the help-to-buy scheme or any of these other schemes is money that is just going to pour into the pockets of developers and vulture funds. There is no action to deal with the profiteering and speculation of those who control land and the supply of housing in this country. It is shameful that, when the capital resources are available to establish a State construction company that could build social and affordable housing on the public land bank, the Government has failed to do so. We will therefore remain dependent on private developers and investors to deliver the supply of housing, including most social and affordable housing. We are still dependent on private contractors and developers when, even with the best will in the world, they do not have the capacity to deliver what is necessary. Even if they wanted to, they do not have the scale. In any event, what they deliver is too expensive, coming in at shockingly high prices. The development at Shanganagh in my area sums it up. So-called affordable housing is priced at €340,000 to €380,000. That is not affordable but that is all they are capable of delivering because the Government will not deal with the fundamental problem, which is that people who are out for profit control the land bank and are controlling the supply of housing and the capacity to build it. They are only interested in the profit they can make from other people's housing misery. We needed to use this money to develop a State construction company to build on public land and to control the profiteering of those charging exorbitant rents and prices for housing. While it is not a budgetary measure, it also would have stopped the flow of people being evicted from the private rented sector into homelessness.

The Government boasts that it has boosted the health service budget. While it has indeed gone up in nominal terms, from €22.3 billion to €25.3 billion, it must be taken into account that the Government seriously underbudgeted for health last year and then had to introduce a supplementary budget of €1.5 billion. Inflation must also be taken into account. My God, the Government is certainly not able to control health inflation. Never mind bike sheds and all the rest of it, look at the scale of inflation on the national children's hospital. When you add in demographic changes, an older population and all the rest of it, it becomes clear that there is not enough here to stem the crisis in our health service, the misery of the nearly 1 million people who are waiting for procedures, the chaos in our emergency departments and the chronic understaffing in our hospitals and in multiple areas of our health service, including our CAMHS teams, our children's disability networks and public health nursing. There are deficits in all of these areas and many more. These are not going to be addressed.

There is an issue I have raised before and I believe Fórsa workers are protesting about it later this week. Having announced the lifting of the recruitment embargo it imposed on the health service, in June of this year, the Government reintroduced that embargo under a different name - the pay and numbers strategy. A ceiling, a maximum number of staff that can be recruited into the health service, is again going to be imposed next year. According to the budget book, this will be set at 133,000. The Minister says this is an increase of 3,000 on last year but, as the INMO has pointed out, the pay and numbers staff ceiling imposed in June set staffing levels at the same levels as December 2023, meaning that this year would, in the area of nursing and midwifery alone, see an effective cut of 2,000 in the whole-time equivalent number of nurses and midwives. I am sure that, along with the rest of the areas of chronic understaffing, this will more than account for the so-called increases we are looking at.

The reality is that the Government is imposing a ceiling that has nothing to do with patient safety or safe staffing numbers, which is what our healthcare workers and professionals have been telling us is needed. It is obvious when you go into the hospitals. Maternity leave and sick leave are not being covered in many hospitals. When people retire, staff are not being recruited to replace them. People are being pulled all over the hospital to cover for a lack of staffing in one area or another. People are often doing things they are not even trained to do, endangering patient safety. That is the reality of what is going on and it results from the imposition of an effective embargo through the setting of these staff ceilings. There is nothing in this budget that suggests the Government has any intention of increasing staffing levels, sanctioning posts and recruiting the people necessary to get us up to safe staffing levels, which should be the baseline for the funding of the health service. What is going to ensure patient safety? What is going to ensure that health workers have conditions that do not leave them completely demoralised, stressed and overrun? The situation for many of them is so bad that they just do not want to work in the health service and so head off to other countries.

The mental health budget is still less than 6% of the overall health budget, even though it has been stated time and again that we need to get the mental health budget up to at least 10% of the overall health budget.

Another really shocking feature of a budget where the Government has this enormous surplus of more than €20 billion and another projected surplus of €9 billion next year, is that, very importantly, it is coming against the background of staggering increases in the profits of the big corporations in this country and an enormous accumulation in the wealth of the very richest in Irish society. This has taken place under successive Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael Governments over the last ten or 15 years. In a context where we have the resources that could eliminate poverty and give working people a break, the Government has given them crumbs. The European Anti-Poverty Network, for example, looking at the €12 increase, has said that to get the real value of the basic social welfare or pension payment just back to the level it was at in 2020, there would have needed to have been a minimum of a €20 increase on the basic payment. The Government has given the increase of €12. The €20 increase would just have been to get us back to where we were in 2020.

People remain in poverty, therefore, and will remain in poverty. That €12 increase will not cover the accumulated cost-of-living hikes that people have endured and suffered over the last several years since this crisis took off. This was a period during which, I repeat, profits went through the roof and the accumulation of the wealth in the hands of the richest in this country increased absolutely dramatically. As we highlighted in our alternative budget, profits over the last ten years have gone up by 294%, but people on social welfare and pension payments are still going to be worse off than they were in 2020. It is absolutely disgraceful. In our alternative budget, we proposed to raise everybody on a social welfare or pension payment above the poverty level. We have about 700,000 to 800,000 people living in, around or below the poverty level and we proposed bringing all of them above that poverty level by having a minimum payment of €300 and a cost-of-disability payment of an additional €50 to cover the enormous cost of disability. The Government had the resources to do it, but it refused to do it because it is interested in looking after the superwealthy rather than eliminating poverty when it does have the resources available.

I know the Minister of State is shaking her head. I suspect, you see, that people do not even know just the extent of the tax expenditures and tax write-offs that go to the giant multinational corporations because we do not discuss them. I still do not see those figures. I do not know if we are going to see them over the next day or two. I certainly did not see them in the budget package. I refer to the tax expenditures and the shadow budget of tax reliefs, most of which go to the big corporations. Where is the list detailing them and how much is going to them next year? We know. We go to the bother of bringing these tax expenditures and write-offs up at the Committee on Budgetary Oversight and detailing some of them in our alternative budget and they are quite staggering.

The figures are always a year or two behind but they are quite staggering. In 2022, for example, capital allowances to the big corporations amounted to €101 billion, while intergroup transactions amounted to €4 billion in tax expenditures. Losses, including capital allowances brought forward, where these big wealthy corporations get to write-off taxes based on previous losses, amounted to €16 billion. The research and development tax credit, that goes overwhelmingly to the big corporations, amounted to €1.1 billion. I will not go through the entire list, but these sums are enormous and they bring down the taxable profits of the big corporations by tens and tens of billions of euro. This means that these corporations, in reality, pay not the 12.5% they are supposed to pay but about 7%. As we know from Apple, some of them are paying considerably less. The Government did not even want to take that money off them. It fought not to take that money off them. Now that we have that money, virtually nothing additional is being done with it. It has gone into the Future Ireland Fund and the infrastructural fund to be done we do not know what with.

Regarding the money that has been mentioned, the €3 billion, it is not at all clear what is going to be done with it. Some €1 billion is going to the LDA and some extra money is also going into energy, etc. What, though, is this money actually going to be spent on? When we consider the slowness of the LDA in delivering social and affordable housing and the cost at which it is delivering it, it is debatable if it is going to increase in any significant way the delivery or affordability of the social and affordable housing it is supposed to deliver.

For workers, there is an extra 80 cent for those on the minimum wage. I was looking at the Ministers' budget book and those on €25,000 are going to get about €1,400 extra this year, mostly because of the small increase in the minimum wage. Their tax liability, however, will be slightly more than it was last year, which is interesting. The tax changes brought in by the Government, therefore, have favoured the higher income earners. Let us contrast this €1,400, which, again, will not even keep pace, in reality, with inflation and the cost-of-living hikes, with another figure. According to the budget book, people on €127,000, or €125,000, which I think this was one of the examples, while another example concerned people on €114,000, are going to gain more from the taxation changes in the budget than someone on the minimum wage. It is disgraceful. There is no real effort to address the problem of the working poor in this country, who are the lowest paid workers. The people at the top of the income distribution are going to do considerably better.

I also wish to mention higher education, and all we are getting in this area. People need to think about this aspect. One of the biggest problems we have along with the housing crisis, although it is significantly connected to it, is skills shortages. For the life of me, I cannot understand why it is being addressed this way in the budget when we need to get tens of thousands more people qualified in a whole range of areas, including the construction trades professions, the healthcare professions and teaching. We could go through the list and include examples in almost every area, including the caring professions. We need more people qualified, but instead of using all this money to eliminate the financial obstacles and barriers to people getting qualified, we have done virtually nothing. It is absolutely miserable. The Government has maintained a once-off €1,000 cut in the registration fee and a once-off 33% reduction in the apprentice contribution. There is also some vague mention of action on postgraduate stipends, although it is not clear what this actually is.

With all the resources available to the Government, it is obvious to me that it would have abolished all fees that are financial obstacles to people getting qualified in higher and further education, in the trades and professions, and so on, where we need to get people qualified. There should also be substantial additional money for student accommodation, not just to provide more of it but to make it genuinely affordable, which it is not currently. Even when on-campus accommodation is built, it is offered at completely unaffordable rents for many, many students. We need, therefore, genuinely free higher and further education.

The Government has done nothing, despite all of the resources at its disposal, to genuinely increase access, create more places and remove the financial barriers and obstacles to people getting qualified in these areas.

In arts, culture and sports, there have been some minor increases but they just about keep pace with inflation. There was a 6% increase in total in arts, culture and sports, with only 3% of in increase in the arts and culture area, which represents just about standing still. There is no significant real increase in the money available and it is certainly not going to address the problem of widespread precarity and poverty among the vast majority of people engaged in the arts, music and performance in this country. We propose, for example, that everybody who applied for the basic income for artists should get it. All the Government is proposing to do is extend the pilot scheme by a few months, which sees money being given to only a fraction of the artists, performers and people who work in the arts who applied in the first place for that support. Again, the Government has the resources to do it. It could also, as we suggested, impose taxes on the social media and big IT companies to fund the arts, culture, and public service broadcasting in a way that would provide security and decent incomes for people who work in the arts. I could go on but my time is up.

This budget is just more of the same from the Government. It is more of the same as it continues the big tax reliefs and tax credits for large corporations, protects the interests of the super rich and does nothing to redistribute the unprecedented wealth and profits that are being made in this country to eliminate poverty, to give working people a decent break in respect of the cost of living, to deliver social and affordable housing, decent health services and other public services that people in this country need and deserve.

Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE)
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The Minister, Deputy Chambers, spoke earlier about the Apple tax money having "the capacity to be transformational". He did not mention, nor did the Minister, Deputy Donohoe, that, as Deputy Boyd Barrett has pointed out, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael fought tooth and nail not to take this transformative amount of money, to say that €14 billion should stay on the cash pile of one of the biggest, richest corporations in the world. He also did not mention that they wasted €10 million of public money in fighting that case. People will remember what happened around the Apple tax. It will be a focal point of the coming general election campaign because it epitomises the reality of politics and the class nature of the society we live in where, in the words of James Connolly, governments are committees of the rich to manage the affairs of the capitalist class. The truth is that this Government puts the profits of big corporations like Apple, of big developers and of big corporate landlords before the needs of ordinary people. That is the essence of the sort of Government we have.

In any case, against its own wishes, we now have the money. I actually agree with Deputy Chambers that it has the capacity to be transformational but is anyone in the Government actually making the case that this is a transformational budget? Where are the transformational changes in this budget? There is nothing that can be trumpeted as transformational. There are a few once-off payments and a few tax breaks, which I will get to presently, but where is the State construction company in the context of an unprecedented housing crisis with record house prices and rents and record levels of homelessness? Where is the public childcare? Where is the public provision of childcare, free at the point of access, in the context of families spending an extra mortgage every month for one child and an extra two mortgages a month for two children? Where is the investment in public transport, renewable energy and retrofitting in the context of the climate catastrophe that we are heading towards? There is no mention of the building of a national health service and no provision for a special class in every school across the country. There is nothing in this budget that can be pointed at as being transformational. In fact, it is the opposite of a transformational budget. It is a series of one-off, sometimes twice-off measures for ordinary people in social welfare and child benefit. There is a reduction in student fees but even the reduction in public transport fees is continued on a once-off basis.

It is the biggest scam ever, this once-off business where the Government comes in, year after year, and announces the same measures that it announced the previous year and expects to get some applause for it. This is all a very obvious ploy to try to continue the 100-year rule of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. We have once-off measures for ordinary people but permanent tax breaks for the wealthy of various sorts. We have an extension of the angel investor relief. I am sure millions of people across the country are breathing a sigh of relief that their angel investments will attract tax relief. There are extra incentives like the employment investment incentive, start-up relief for entrepreneurs, a start-up capital incentive, a series of extensions to capital gains tax relief and a new extension of relief for incorporated farms, which are agribusinesses. Fine Gael just put out a tweet with which I agree. The tweet contains a graphic that says "Fine Gael is backing business". One of the headline points the party is highlighting to show how it is backing business, proudly, is "no increase in sick leave days" and in brackets, "which were due to double in January". In what world is it a bad thing to increase sick day leave, in terms of public health or workers' rights? Fine Gael thinks it is a bad thing to do something that was promised. When the Government originally introduced the sick pay legislation, we pointed out that it was not baked into the legislation that the number of days would increase in the way the Government was saying they would. The Minister said that there was no need to worry about that because it would be done by ministerial order. Now, precisely as we warned, the Government is not doing it. Why? It is because Fine Gael is backing business.

Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)
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It is disgraceful.

Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE)
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It is backing business at the expense of workers. That is exactly what it is doing.

The reason this Government - or the next Government if it is returned - is not going to introduce a transformative budget is that it will not break from its reliance on the market. In other words, it will not break from the prioritisation of profit for Apple, corporate landlords, private developers, private health insurers, private hospital providers and so on. Their profit comes before the needs of people affected by the housing and health crises, the crisis in terms of additional needs and so on. What is required is planning, public ownership and putting people's needs first but this Government is absolutely allergic to that,

I will go into a bit more detail now on some areas of the budget. If anything demonstrates that this budget is an attempt to buy the election, it is the Government's treatment of young people. The Government is not attempting to buy young people but is attempting to drive them out of the country. There is almost nothing in this budget for young people because the Government has given up on attracting their votes. Its best hope is to simply drive them out. Let us take the issue of jobseeker's allowance for young people. One of the horrific measures introduced in the context of the financial crash was to separate out and create a new rate for people under 25, effectively cutting the dole for young people and 16 years later, this discrimination against young people continues. In the context of a massive budget surplus, the Government is continuing with this discrimination, leaving some young people, increasingly driven to live at home because of the housing crisis, on €141.70 per week. Then there is the issue of so-called sub-minimum wage rates. Passed by this Dáil well over a year ago, then delayed by a year, was a Bill that we introduced to get rid of these exploitative rates allowing people to be paid less than the minimum wage. The Low Pay Commission unanimously recommended the ending of these sub-minimum wage rates but there is nothing on this in the budget. The Government is going to continue with these sub-minimum wage rates, allowing the legal super-exploitation of thousands of young workers who can be paid as little as €9.45 per hour.

Mick Barry (Cork North Central, Solidarity)
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It is a disgrace.

Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE)
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The treatment of education is summed up by the fact that, as the INTO has pointed out, more money has been allocated to the gimmick of smartphone pouches, to grab a cheap headline, than to increases in capitation for primary schools.

That is absolutely scandalous and demonstrates a lack of priority for young people. The Government refused to introduce a second tier of child benefit for the poorest children in the State as called for by all the major child welfare and child poverty organisations, including the Children Rights Alliance. There is a stingy €4 increase to the qualified child allowance for children under 12, €8 for children over 12 and no increase to monthly child benefit rates, doing nothing to address the rate of child poverty in this country with one in ten families reliant on food banks to survive.

There is some talk of celebrating the idea that new parents are getting a so-called baby boost of a payment of €420. I can tell from experience that that €420 will not go very far. What will go far for those who need it least is the tax benefit to be given to the richest 3% of households by cutting inheritance tax. Certainly there is a real baby boost to them, gaining a tax benefit of €21,450.

I will finish with the nothing that is here for the environment. We need a transformational amount of money to shift the whole nature of the economy to have a rapid just transition that improves people's lives, but there is almost nothing here. There is no substantial roll-out of renewable energy. We should be hearing today about new train lines across the country. We should be hearing today about new metro and new Luas services. We should be hearing about free public transport right across the board instead of the meagre increase for a very small number of children. There is nothing like that whatsoever.

The only glint of light in this budget that we have seen today is definite evidence for people that a general election is coming and is coming very soon. It is no accident that payments are due to be rolled out this month and in November. From what is happening today, it is pretty clear that we are facing an election in the next six, seven or eight weeks. That will be people's opportunity. I do not think they will be fooled by this budget. It will be their opportunity to end 100 years of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, to end 5,000 continuous days of Fine Gael in one form or another and to elect a left government.

Mick Barry (Cork North Central, Solidarity)
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My God, what could have been done with this budget when we look at the wealth in this country. Oxfam has advised that 1% now own 35% of financial wealth and 10% own 54% of total household net wealth. Profits trebled in the last ten years. Corporations might have made more than €300 billion profits after tax last year. If we had a government that was prepared to use the State surplus along with the Apple tax and go after some of this wealth, we would have a government that could transform Irish society. A free national health service, a free State-provided childcare service and free public transport would be within reach. Instead we have a government with no vision introducing a one-for-everybody-in-the-audience budget in an attempt to buy an election and a government which is determined to defend the interests of the rich and powerful at every hand's turn.

This could have and should have been a landmark budget but it is not because of this Government's slavish adherence to free market ideology, trying to find market solutions where market solutions have failed before. The Government's free market obsession can be viewed right across the spectrum of government, from bike sheds to bungalows.

Let us take the issue of housing. The market is not delivering nearly enough houses. In particular the market is not delivering nearly enough affordable homes. Here was an opportunity to set up a State construction company with a laser-like focus on building not-for-profit social and affordable housing. The usual mantra that the money was not there would not cut it. The Apple billions gave the opportunity to provide the seed capital for such a company. This Government, facing a giant open goal with the ball at its feet, blew it. We have no State construction company, no seed capital, no not-for-profit social and affordable housing and not even an increase in the State's housing targets, which is quite incredible. We have the same old same old, only more of it, throwing money at developers and landlords. It is clear the housing crisis will not be tackled in the way it needs to be tackled by this Government. A new government can only tackle it by changing the policy and ending the reliance on these market-based solutions.

Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael may well believe that ship of government is sailing into calm untroubled waters after this budget, but there are rocks up ahead and the budget does not seem to be steering away from them. One of these rocks is the HSE's pay and numbers strategy. During the summer, the Government announced an end to the recruitment freeze in our health service but then it replaced it with a recruitment freeze by another name. The Minister's pay and numbers strategy is causing distress and anger right across the workforce in the HSE. Some 88% of Fórsa members polled report staff vacancies in their own departments. Health service unions say the caps Government has imposed will leave at least 2,000 vacancies unfilled. The Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation is balloting for industrial action on this issue in just 13 days' time. This Thursday I will join INMO, Fórsa and SIPTU members at a lunchtime protest at the gates of Cork University Hospital. This is an early warning for the Minister that he sails on with that one at his peril.

While I am on the health service, I have two other brief points. There is a €3 billion increase, but €1.5 billion of that makes up the shortfall from last year and a further €1.2 million is just to maintain existing services. There is very little for new measures there. I think it might be heading for some difficulties over the winter with that.

In November 2022 Transgender Europe ranked Ireland 27th out of 27 EU countries for trans healthcare. It reported that a trans person in Ireland might wait up to ten years just for an appointment with a specialist. This is not acceptable nor is the outdated approach at the national gender service. We need a significant increase in funding for trans healthcare and a switch to a new GP-led informed consent model.

In 2021 the Department of Social Protection commissioned a report from Indecon on the cost of disability in Ireland. The report found that disabled people had to cover special costs averaging between €8,700 and €12,300 per year - the cost of medicines, the cost of care, the cost of extra heating and the cost of taxis and travel. This budget is proof if proof were needed that the Government does not see disabled people as equals. It increased disability payments by €12 a week and threw in a once-off payment of €400 - a combined total of a few bob over €1,000. That is a mere fraction of what disabled people need, even according to the report that the Government commissioned, if there is to be any semblance of equality for disabled people in our society. If the Government cannot take a giant stride towards income equality for people with disabilities when the State coffers are overflowing, disabled people will rightly draw the conclusion that the parties in this Government will never take the steps that disabled people need. We also need to see the abolition of the punitive means tax on disabled people who will not take charity any more. They will stand up for their rights and we will stand with them.

The Minister announced extra funding for Uisce Éireann. People will want to see this money going to improve their water supply rather than to feed the fat cats at the top of this organisation. Last Thursday night I stood with residents of the Mount Farran estate in Blackpool on the northside of Cork city as they protested over the prevalence of brown and orange discoloured water flowing from their taps. These residents were outraged that Uisce Éireann now has 16 people on its payroll who were each paid more than €200,000 last year. They asked why there are such big bonuses for the people at the top when the ordinary householder has to put up with disgraceful discoloration. Many other communities in Cork and other parts of the country will be asking the same thing.

There is an epidemic of gender-based violence in our society. Women's Aid received more than 40,000 disclosures of domestic abuse last year, the highest ever recorded in the charity's 50-year history. The Istanbul Convention signed by this State commits the State to one refuge space for every 10,000 of the population. To hit the Istanbul target there would need to be 512 spaces in this State. The total cost would be €1.27 billion to bridge from where we are to that. How much did the Government commit to organisations dealing with gender-based violence? An extra €7 million. To the Government's shame, with coffers overflowing these organisations will still be forced to go out and organise raffles and other fundraisers to provide the services that women need in 2025.

On 20 October hundreds of services will be cut from five Cork city bus routes. Bus Éireann states it cannot recruit and retain the drivers needed to serve the routes. At the end of the day this is because of the wages and conditions of bus workers, which are inadequate. This issue should have been addressed in the budget. The people of Cork and those who rely on public transport throughout the State have been let down by the failure today to address this issue.

The minimum wage is to increase to €13.50 an hour on 1 January, as recommended by the Low Pay Commission. It is a paltry pay increase when rents are sky high and the cost-of-living crisis still bears down on people and especially on the low paid. The Low Pay Commission also proposed that young people under the age of 20 should be entitled to the full minimum wage as and from 1 January. The Minister was silent on this matter in his speech. I ask the Minister to break his silence and to clarify the position. It would be outrageous if the Minister were to defy this recommendation and keep in place a wage structure that discriminates openly against young people. I ask for clarification please on this issue.

If we had a government in the State that was prepared, in the interests of the very many, to go after the wealth that has been cornered by the very few, and couple it with the Apple tax money and the State surplus that is there, and if we had a government with a vision of a better society, better public services and better lives for ordinary people, we could have had a transformational budget. As I said at the outset, we could have a free national health service, free public transport and free State-provided childcare. These were within the grasp of a Government that had vision and that was prepared to take on the vested interests in society. Unfortunately it is clear that is not the Government which the Minister of State is representing in the House today.

Seán Ó Fearghaíl (Kildare South, Ceann Comhairle)
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Next is the Regional Group and Deputy Canney is sharing time with his colleagues.

Seán Canney (Galway East, Independent)
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I welcome the opportunity to speak on the budget announced today. A lot of money is being given out. There is a lot of detail that we have not seen yet. Something that came to my mind at the very start of this is that so much money is being flayed out all over the place, the most important thing will be how we are going to manage it. How are we going to make sure that money reaches where it is intended to go? With the social welfare payments, it will get to the people who need it but if we look at infrastructure and how we will spend the capital money, there are issues that need to be addressed as a matter of urgency.

We have a procurement and public spending code that is not fit for purpose. It delays projects and adds more costs to them. We have a flawed national planning framework whereby we deny the zoning of land and, in turn, this denies young people a chance to build a house in their local town or village. This is because the local area plan must go with a core strategy.

Last Sunday morning I was at a protest in Loughrea. Approximately 500 people came out at 10 a.m. in the rain because the Office of the Planning Regulator and the Minister want to dezone land that was zoned for recreational purposes. This is badly needed in Loughrea but we have a Government policy that says we cannot have it. We have to think about how we are spending money and how we are accountable for it. We have had plenty of examples in recent weeks of how things have got out of control entirely, probably because of the ego of an architect or an architectural design that creates large costs with taxpayers' money and no accountability.

Something else the Government has to take into account leading into an election is that the Northern and Western Regional Assembly area is in decline. It is a lagging region. We should be positively discriminating in favour of the region in terms of investment. When I hear about all of the money being spent today I have concerns about the Galway city outer bypass. Where is that? Where is the western rail corridor? Where is Galway port? There is great news about Cork port but where is Galway port? What about all of the towns and villages in all of our counties that are devoid of wastewater treatment plants which means, in turn, housing cannot be built? I see that €1 billion has been allocated to Irish Water. When I look at what it is for I do not see a large amount of money being put in for the fast-track development of wastewater treatment plants.

The budget has been neutral for farming. The concept that farmers have such volatility in their income at present is not being taken into account in the budget. There are announcements of millions for this and millions for something else. It is about how it is implemented and how quickly the money gets to the farmers' accounts. If they do not have certainty of when they will get their grants this will destroy their cash flow. It means that farmers are thinking about getting out of farming rather than being encouraged to get into it.

I have a concern about the residential zoned land tax. It is important that we clarify this once and for all. It is more than 18 months since I first raised it with then Taoiseach, Deputy Varadkar, who stated then that there was a problem. We are still talking today about getting a resolution for it so that active farmers can continue to farm without having a fear that the land would be taxed. It should not be taxed, and people accept this, but there seems to be inertia with trying to get a plan in place to exempt functional farmers.

I am a member of the Committee on Disability Matters and I am concerned about carers and children who have disabilities waiting for services. They are waiting to get assessments. With regard to the CDNT unit in Tuam, this time last year parents were protesting because of the lack of services. Money is being put into taking on more staff but money was put into this last year and staff were not taken on, for whatever reason. I know of people who have emigrated because the HSE would not give them a permanent position. It is important that we do not just throw money at a problem. We have to have an effective way of getting people to work in our health system. The only way we can do this is by making it attractive and giving people permanent jobs and putting in enough people to take some of the stress out of the job.

The review of the housing adaptation grant and the housing aid for older people has been going on for a hell of a long time. Today money has been announced for these grants, which are administered and which help people with disabilities and keep people in their homes longer. I do not see the detail of whether there is an increase in funding to allow a bigger grant to be given or whether there is an increase in the income threshold for people so they can get the highest possible percentage grant from the local authorities. They are fantastic grants but because of construction inflation we need to make sure the money matches what is relevant in today's world and look at the income thresholds.

Another issue I have raised with the Minister is with regard to the primary medical certificate. It is a Department of Finance issue. The primary medical certificate is not fit for purpose. The criteria are too strict and everybody knows this. The Minister has been reviewing it for a long time. Now is the time to put in place proper primary medical certificate criteria in order that people who need help to become a bit more independent and adapt their cars can get the certificate.

I welcome the baby boost of €420 but what about the babies who will be born in October, November and December? Why will this grant not be given to babies born from now on, seeing that it has been announced? It is unfair to leave babies and families out of it just because we pick a certain date.

6 o’clock

It will not be a huge amount of money in the overall scheme of things. I ask the Minister of State to consider that as a generous gift for Christmas.

Peter Fitzpatrick (Louth, Independent)
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I congratulate the Minister, Deputy Chambers, on his first budget.

This budget was framed as a budget for families and alleviating the cost-of-living. While there are aspects that are welcome, the measures barely scratch the surface of what is required to help ordinary families. We cannot celebrate economic growth when many are left behind.

First, I will touch on housing. The Government has acknowledged the housing crisis, but its proposed measures are inadequate to address the challenges. Rents rising by 27%, record homelessness and an increasing housing list reflect the failure to provide affordable options. Recent figures show that 14,486 people, including 4,417 children, live in emergency accommodation.

Record house prices, record rents and promises of increased housing supply have not translated into urgent actions. The Housing for All plan has proven ineffective and the ongoing housing crisis continues to leave more families struggling to find a home. Although the Government increased the rent tax credit, the budget failed to increase the housing targets to address the rental property shortage, leaving renters with fewer options and unaffordable rents. The Housing for All plan is overly reliant on the private market and vulture funds, with no measures to curb this. A thorough plan is necessary to tackle the affordability crisis, which should include funding for public housing, rent regulation and enhanced tenant protections. Without initiatives like rent freezes and preventing landlords profiteering, housing will continue to be unaffordable. Ultimately, home ownership has collapsed. The average age of ownership is 39. This budget lacks a clear strategy for expanding the rental stock, exacerbating the crisis and affecting students, young professionals and families. Young people are either living in their childhood home or emigrating.

Second, I would like to discuss health and mental health. When we look at the healthcare allocations in this budget, it is clear that the Government is once again focused on firefighting rather than structural reform. No-one would argue against better resources, but we cannot continue to pour money into a broken system without reforming the way it works. Our health service is under immense strain with record waiting times, overwhelmed emergency departments and critical shortages of staff. To fix this, we need a complete overhaul of how we deliver healthcare. We must move towards a universal, single-tier healthcare system where access to care is based on need, not the ability to pay. This budget should have committed to a bold plan to make healthcare free at the point of use, as promised under the long-delayed Sláintecare plan. Instead, we see piecemeal funding increases that will not address the root causes of the crisis in our health system. Waiting lists are symptoms of deeper structural issues, poor resource management and a lack of co-ordinated care between hospitals and community services. This budget needed to focus on a strategy to streamline services, improve management practices and ensure that patients receive timely, quality care. We also need to address the chronic shortages in healthcare professionals by providing better pay, conditions and opportunities for training and development to attract and retain staff. In my constituency of Louth and east Meath, there is a lack of GPs, orthodontists, neurologists and psychologists. Community healthcare organisation, CHO, 8 is one of only two CHOs in the country that has not received funding for a community neurorehabilitation team. This list goes on.

Furthermore, mental health services are overstretched and underfunded, with long waiting lists and inadequate support for young people. I will acknowledge the progress made with reforms to the Mental Health Act. Passing laws is not enough, however. We need action, implementation and resources. What percentage of the health budget will go to mental health? Is it likely to remain stagnant at 5% to 6%? We need ring-fenced funding for mental health to ensure it does not get swallowed up by other competing priorities and ensure full alignment with the goals set out in the Mental Health Act. That means increasing investment in mental health infrastructure and training and ensuring that services are accessible, particularly in rural Ireland. Additionally, we must prioritise early intervention programmes and community-based mental health services, which can prevent issues from escalating into crises.

At this point, I would like to touch on carers and people with a disability. The €12 per week increase in all social welfare rates in the new year, an increase in the carer's support grant to €2,000, a €200 living alone lump sum and a range of cost-of-living payments for carers and pensioners between now and Christmas are welcome. However, these once-off payments do not come close to covering the additional costs carers absorb, such as medical equipment, home adaptations and transportation. Carers save the State billions of euro each year. The means test overlooks the emotional, physical and financial burdens of caregiving. The Regional Group motion last week called upon the Government to implement the unanimous recommendation of the joint Oireachtas committee on social protection to set a roadmap for a non-means tested participation income for family carers by 2027. While I will acknowledge the increase in the means income disregard, one of the greatest oversights in this budget is the lack of meaningful reform to the carer’s allowance means test as it is gender-biased and no longer fit for purpose. The abolition of the means test and its replacement with a participation income based on the valuable work family carers make in our society would have been welcome for thousands of carers, lifting them out of poverty and provided essential support.

Similarly, the Government has failed to provide sufficient support for people with disabilities, which the Regional Group highlighted in our pre-budget meeting. Although there are small increases in disability allowances, this falls far short of covering the additional €9,000 to €12,000 per year incurred by a disabled person. There is still no comprehensive national strategy to address accessibility, independence and the provision of adequate services for those living with disabilities.

Finally, the budget's minor business supports, and the unchanged 13.5% VAT rate are Government failures, risking closure for many food-led businesses. It falls short of what is required to ensure our SMEs remain competitive and viable in an increasingly challenging economic landscape. What this budget needed was a targeted package of supports for SMEs, incorporating tax reliefs with access to low-interest loans and grants to help them transition to more sustainable and digital operations. We should have empowered SMEs with the tools they need to innovate, grow and create jobs rather than leaving them vulnerable to further economic shocks.

To conclude, I recognise and welcome the measures introduced by the Government today, which will offer short-term benefits. However, I urge greater reform and investment across the various sectors instead of once-off splurges to ensure basic rights and reduce poverty in the long term. Everything I said is what is actually happening on the ground.

Verona Murphy (Wexford, Independent)
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Having delivered a one-for-everybody-in-the audience-style budget in the short term, I have no doubt that people will appreciate the spirit and bona fides of the Minister's belief that it is to combat the cost of living. There is no doubt that it will be short-lived, however, because now that I am experiencing my fifth budget, I know that most of what has been announced will not be delivered. That comes from experience. I have learned that quite often delivery never happens. Coming from County Wexford, we have had no extension of the N11, a 33 km stretch that is ultimately a car park at certain times of the day depending on the boat traffic for the growing port of Rosslare Harbour. We do not have the 97-bed hospital unit we were promised. I have been elected for five years and we are no further along. As I said, much of what the Government announces never gets delivered.

I will come back to that, however, because I want to discuss some of the items or issues the Government has chosen not to deal with. The sorry fact is that when I was preparing my speech, I could actually have read last year's speech, and it would still be very relevant. As a Government, it has not changed, and it is not going to change because it does not listen. We face the same problems year in, year out. There is no doubt that some will benefit in the short term from the budget, but blind men on galloping horses can see the Government is just buying votes. It has failed to see the bigger picture. Government should not be frittering away the taxpayers' money. That is not the way a responsible government carries on, yet there is no end to the waste. The bigger picture is that the Government got lucky with the receipts for foreign direct investment , FDI. We are lucky that we are in a surplus scenario because with the lack of investment in infrastructure, we could well be in a deficit. That could all change with the election in November in America. I caution the Minister of State to think about this. We could be in a very serious deficit this time next year because the Government has not chosen to plan the infrastructure of either water or electricity, as is required by the FDI tech sector, the money from which we are now spending.

In effect, the Government is killing off the goose that is laying the golden egg. Some €38 billion in Amazon investment has gone elsewhere because of our policies, our lack of infrastructure planning and our planning policy. This is a travesty and puts us in jeopardy.

The Government has failed to recognise that a 9% VAT rate could have had zero tax implications for the State. It could have been done simply by joining the dots. There is a specific issue at Dublin Airport, which is subject to a passenger cap due to a traffic management planning process under a regulation that was introduced in 2007. We have failed to deal with the issue in the 17 years since. We built a second runway to increase our ability to take traffic at Dublin Airport, but the fact that we have capped tourist numbers means that we will be €500 million down this time next year. Had we dealt with the issue, the €500 million flowing from an increase in tourist numbers could have offset the €500 million lost through the reduction in VAT to 9% for the tourism sector. For the 300,000 people involved in the sector, not reducing the rate means that more restaurants and cafes will close. Many of them are in rural Ireland, where the hospitality sector has lost beds in recent years due to the Ukrainian war and the refugee crisis, which came on top of the housing crisis. We no longer have bed nights in rural areas, so the cafes and restaurants that depend on tourists are not seeing their footfall. The cost of living also means that locals are not out spending like they used to. Not reducing VAT is a missed opportunity. The tourism sector will effectively suffer a deficit of €1 billion because the Government is unable to join the dots.

I do not know whether anyone has ever considered that Michael O'Leary of Ryanair has probably done more for this country than many of our foreign direct investors. This is not to praise Michael O'Leary. I do not know him and have never met him. I just know that he opened Ireland up to the world and the world up to Ireland. It is a travesty that we do not listen to people who know what they are talking about. That the Minister is being a bit of a big girl’s blouse about this and that the Taoiseach will not take command of the matter is not helping. I suggest that the Minister of State take the message back to the Government that if we are to continue growing Ireland and we have the sense not to ruin the tourism sector, someone should take action about the cap at Dublin Airport.

The same applies to housing, where the Government has not listened to the developers or builders. It is as if they are pariahs. The Government is out of ideas, though. My proposal of a 0% VAT rate for new builds would instigate the commencement of the 50,000 planning applications that have not yet been commenced because they are not viable. The Government’s tax take on new house builds is 48%, but we are telling people that housing will be affordable. All we are doing now is building social housing, as no one else can afford to buy a house at the cost base the Government has set. Take 30.5% away. If the Government does not recognise the viability issue and reduce its tax take, we will never see those houses built. The Government has to know what the problem is if it is going to solve it.

I am out of time, although I do not know if any amount of time would let me get through the exponential growth in waste overseen by this Government, from the children’s hospital to the modular builds. As we saw yesterday, those modular builds cost double their estimate. This is a serious issue. What of the bike shelter that is not really a bike shelter? At €336,000, it is a national disgrace. Add to that the cost of a security hut and we have flittered away approximately €2 million of taxpayers’ money, yet this is only the tip of the iceberg. I could go on and on. I ask the Minister of State to take the message to the Government that this is a serious issue and that we need to eradicate the waste, as we may one day not have the foreign direct investment that the Government is enjoying at the moment.

We have to consider the SME sector. Some 1.2 million of our employees work therein, yet I can see nothing in this budget to assist SMEs. They have to undergo the increase in the minimum wage. That increase is necessary, given that we as normal people cannot afford the cost of living, but many of the measures the Government has introduced are inflationary and will drive up the cost of living. The carbon tax on fuel is being increased. As the Minister of State knows, anything that affects transport drives up the cost of everything else.

It is time that the Government stopped thinking about the parties in government and what is politically expedient for them and started thinking more about expenditure for the people who elect them and their future in Ireland.

Cathal Berry (Kildare South, Independent)
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I welcome the opportunity to comment on the budget. Overall, I welcome its thrust. It is not perfect, but it represents progress in some areas. I will focus on three particular sectors that are rarely mentioned in the Chamber anymore: defence, agriculture and the shared island programme.

I welcome the increase in defence expenditure. An extra €100 million represents an 8% increase, making for the largest defence budget in my lifetime of €1.35 billion. This is positive. It is neither adequate or sufficient, but it is a half step in the right direction. More important is how the €1.35 billion is going to be spent. We can throw around headline figures all we want, but this is where the focus should be.

I wish to express my gratitude to everyone on the Government and Opposition benches and at home who has been involved in this work for the past number of years. Worthwhile and dignified advocacy down the years has led to some progress, particularly from a pay perspective. As of today, a new private, three star, of 18 years of age or whatever age can start at €40,000. This is a psychologically important level to focus on and represents an increase of more than 50% on the €27,500 level it was at at the start of this Dáil. The patrol duty offshore allowance for the Naval Service was doubled nine months ago. There has also been progress in respect of the naval personnel tax credit and the ARW allowance. However, our military personnel are still the lowest paid public servants, so there is still much more work to be done. We need to focus on long service increments, the European working time directive and, in particular, overtime payments. Every other uniformed service gets overtime payments for rostered duty hours. It should be no different for a peacetime military.

Regarding premises, I acknowledge that there has been progress on buildings nationally, particularly at the Curragh Camp in my constituency. There is a new cadet school, new headquarters, a new engineering building and a new transport building. Work on a new communications building is also ongoing. There are two other buildings – one in Dublin and the other in the Curragh – I am not supposed to mention, but €35 million is being spent on them. However, more progress is needed. As the Ceann Comhairle will be aware, more than 60 family homes at the Curragh Camp are either vacant or derelict. This is unacceptable and unnecessary, particularly given the housing crisis. There should be a crèche in the Curragh, on the naval base in Haulbowline and at Baldonnel. If we want more women to join the Defence Forces, we must address these logistical issues. People will then join. Something else that is desperately needed is an east coast naval base in Dún Laoghaire, particularly given what is happening in the Irish Sea and given our critical national infrastructure, including the gas pipelines and electricity interconnector. The terminal is there, but it is almost vacant. We should take full advantage of it.

The money being provided needs to be spent on sonar and radar. In recent weeks, the Dáil has discussed aircraft travelling through Irish airspace without us knowing about them or what they were carrying. It took journalists rather than the State to point them out and that is not good enough.

Most metrics in the defence sector are going in the right direction now, bar people. The head count is still dropping, with the possible exception of the Naval Service. We heard approximately three weeks ago that the navy expects that there will be slightly more sailors at the end of this year than there were at the start, which is an important piece of information. For the first year in a decade, there will be a net increase in naval sailors. That is a positive development. The bottom line is, if pay rates are increased to normal rates, there will be a positive spin-off as well.

The Reserve Defence Force will be rejuvenated. The sooner that happens, the better. It is the natural conveyor belt of people into the regulars. The sooner we get that programme up and running, the better off we will all be.

The second sector I want to talk about is agriculture. It is hugely important, as I am sure the Minister of State, Deputy Colm Burke, knows from his own county of Cork. Generally, it is the poor relation. It does not have the same clout that it had in the past in this Chamber but it should because farms are the original SMEs. They are the lifeblood of rural Ireland and communities as well. I recognise and acknowledge the increase of approximately €150 million to in excess of €2 billion in the agricultural budget for 2025. That is positive. In particular, I welcome the tillage support scheme, which is important for counties Kildare, Kilkenny, Carlow and all the east coast, and the beef and sheep welfare schemes as well. I welcome the additional funding being put onstream to assist farmers in meeting their important climate change targets relating to biodiversity, water and air quality.

The Minister of State knows how hard it has been for farmers over the past two years. One bad year is bad enough, but to have two years back to back is almost a crisis. What we need is that the payments that farmers expect to arrive on time. They should be regular, they should be recurring and they should be absolutely reliable. What has happened over the past couple of years, where there have been delays in TAMS and ACRES payments, is simply not good enough.

Finally, I will focus on the shared island programme. There are some very worthwhile projects here, particularly the Warrenpoint bridge. However, one project that rarely gets a mention is the Mitchell scholars programme. The Taoiseach is visiting the White House in the next couple of weeks and I would like him to raise it with President Biden. The programme, founded by Trina Vargo and named after Senator George Mitchell, is a hugely important link between this country and America. They need €32 million as an endowment to keep this programme up and running. Currently, it is in abeyance. We can provide this funding because the links between this country and North America are important.

In summary, I welcome the general thrust of the budget but there is a huge amount of work to do. It is not perfect in any shape or form, but it is progress. I recognise that limited progress has occurred.

Matt Shanahan (Waterford, Independent)
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I support what Deputy Berry said about the Mitchell scholars.

The unprecedented €10.5 billion budget announcement reflects a heady mix of previous decision-making bearing fruit, good fortune, but also the pain and discipline of the austerity years. The measures announced offer a reprieve from the merciless grip of inflation, rising prices and the diminishing purchasing power facing families. For these many reasons, and the temporary relief it offers, I feel compelled to support it.

People need this relief, but let us not mistake the genesis of these giveaways. They are because principally these concessions have been bought with the people's own money and I would not want to bet on the fulsome gratitude of the electorate in the near future. It is their own hard-earned cash after all.

Indeed, if we fall into the trap of thinking that these windfall gains will last indefinitely, as IFAC believe the Government has, we may have the serious vibes of 1977, 2001 or 2007 all over again - an election bought with our money. I hope the Ministers and Government know what they are doing.

Let us be clear. The Government’s hand has been forced by the crushing burden of the cost-of-living crisis. Previous budgets have added to this inflation. Wages are not rising enough to keep pace with the relentless march of price rises yet increased wage costs are seriously constraining the viability of the small-to-medium business sector and the agri-sector. Housing costs are soaring, energy prices are still punishing the commercial sector and families are cutting back on necessities like never before.

Businesses, particularly those in farming and hospitality. are hurting and some are going to the wall. The budget throws out lifelines, but I am disappointed that the key SME sector appears to have received little to offset its costs crisis. I would also like to have seen something in this budget that offered reform to our dysfunctional public procurement system.

Unprecedented though this budget giveaway undoubtedly is, it falls short of real ambition for Ireland's future in three critical ways. First, it does nothing to address the competitiveness and productivity problems in the economy. The runaway multinational sector is hiding the growing problems in our indigenous business sector. FDI tax has become the new budgetary scaffold allowing us to defy economic gravity. Where is the visionary policy and investment to unleash our indigenous enterprise sector? Where is the grand policy plan needed to empower our private sector to create new businesses, to invest, to collaborate, to innovate with universities, to compete and, most important, to scale? I do not see such initiatives in the budget measures announced. Second, this scattergun approach to spending will almost certainly fail to deliver value for money. We have become more than aware in recent weeks what a train wreck the value proposition has become in public procurement. It is not enough to throw money at problems; we must throw intelligence, strategy, planning and management expertise at them too, but when we look at the bike shed, the security hut, and the national children's hospital, the public at large has good reason not to have confidence in the State to deliver value on any measure. The budget should offer better disclosures on where the funding goes, and better oversight, better scrutiny, better management and better outcomes. We still await transparency in respect all of that. Finally, this budget appears to be the last in a series that patches the cracks without ever addressing the foundations of our economic and social system. There is no vision developed here or a cohesive long-term plan offering the long-term growth or equitable development we need to secure our economic future.

The south-east, my region, like the Border and north west, is now experiencing economic contraction, a drop in regional GDP and a sharp rise in unemployment - all on top of the cost of living crisis. As this Administration draws its last breath, let me ask this of Government. Where is the 24-7 cardiac care that the people of the south east have been demanding for years? It was promised in 2016. Where is the sustained investment in higher education for the region? Less than 6% of the capital investment identified in the South East Technological University's strategic plan has been promised by the Government, let alone delivered. We need to end the regional brain drain that sees two thirds of young people who go to college and migrate out of the region. Without investing in higher education, the region will still lag behind in FDI. It will still miss its ration of this boom and perhaps the next boom too. What of Waterford Airport, a vital gateway and economic driver for the region supporting tourism and enterprise development? Everyone in Waterford and the south east witnessed the Government spend €484 million of public money on other airports, yet it bickers over approving €12 million in matching funding for Waterford.

When regions are starved of investment and when their potential is ignored, they begin to pull away. They begin to question their value to a State that seems indifferent to their needs. This is not just the basis for an economic issue; it also questions democratic values. The people of this country want fairness and a certain toughness on their behalf. They want and expect leadership that is more than just bouncing from one crisis to another. They want to hear a vision for a better future. They want that vision to include them.

Sadly, this budget, like previous others, offers little to national long-term strategic development. It appears more of an effort to buy off the electorate while responding to events. Like some of my Independent colleagues, I will support this budget, but with these reservations. We should use this election campaign to start of a real conversation about the kind of country and the kind of future we want to build, one where no region or its people is left behind and one where, instead of planning for the next election cycle, we begin an inclusive, national, conversation to deliver, not just for today but for the generations of tomorrow.

Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú)
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There is a level of democratic disrespect in the Government here today. God be with the days when they used say that there were budget leaks. Budgets are not leaked anymore; they are broadcast fully in preview before the debate even happens here. The fact that we have TDs from all parts of the country here representing tens of thousands of citizens, yet the Ministers responsible for this budget had not even the democratic manners to stay in the Chamber and listen to the debate in full, which is a big problem as well.

This is a high-octane election budget. It unashamedly seeks to buy citizens’ votes with their own money. It is a McCreevy mark 2 budget. Universal payments are seen as more about raising poll figures than raising people out of poverty. These once-off payments will disappear like snow off a ditch, and they will not get to the heart of what is happening with poverty.

It is important to realise that the people of Ireland are not stupid. They can see the difference between promises and delivery. I will give a couple of examples. The Government has decreased the middle rate of USC, instead of spreading that decrease over the lower rate and middle rate. This means a person on €100,000 will now pocket significantly more than a person earning €50,000. The electricity credits the Government has promised will be completely eroded by the PSO increases and the carbon tax increase. These once-off payments are like sticking plasters for major problems within society. Nothing is being done about the fact that the electricity prices in this country are the highest in Europe. The electricity credits will not help that in the long run. The Government is giving money with one hand and taking with the other. Last year, the amount of money the Government got from fuel taxes was the biggest in the history of the State. The Government pocketed €3.8 billion in fuel taxes in the heart of a cost-of-living crisis. Today, we will see an increase in petrol and diesel again on the same day we see the price of oil spike as a result of the war in the Middle East.

The Government is trumpeting the fact that there will be bigger investment in childcare, yet childcare providers around the country are closing down on a weekly basis. Parents have to book their children into a childcare centre when their child is born. I agree wholeheartedly with the increase in child benefit for newborn babies. Aontú called for that to be given at the fourth month of pregnancy because parents need that money before the baby is born rather than afterwards.

The elephant in the room in this regard is the shocking level of Government waste. The backdrop to this whole budget has been the children's hospital, the €300 million spent on metro north and not a shovel put in the ground and the 110 electric buses that did not move an inch and a half for a year and a half because there was nobody to apply for the charging units. There is the €20 million spent on ventilators during Covid that never worked. In recent times, we have heard of the "Gucci" bike shed and yesterday we had the "Tiffany" modular homes. We have a Government that has managed to spend more on a 45 sq. m modular home in County Laois than it costs to build a house of twice that size in the middle of Dublin. The level of Government waste is excruciating. There is a bonfire of taxpayer money and none of that has been addressed in this budget. That is a major problem. The motto of this Government is "You will get less for more." The Government will provide less infrastructure for more money into the future.

In terms of the targets we see in the budget, it is very hard to take this Government seriously. It has a bit of the feel of Del Boy saying we will all be millionaires next year. The Government comes up with these targets every year for new house builds, especially social housing, and it never meets them. Last year, the Government was out by 2,500 as regards the number of social houses to be built. At the same time, we are spending €1.6 billion on RAS and HAP payments and washing it down the drain. We are getting nothing for that investment which is disappearing every single year.

On regional development, Ireland is becoming a city state. We have people commuting from Connacht, Ulster and Munster into Dublin every day at massive economic, environmental and emotional cost for their families because they are away from them for so long. Yet, we see nothing about the rebalancing of Ireland in this budget. There is no plan for a Navan to Dublin rail line. There is no plan to bring forward the western rail corridor. There is no plan to open an accident and emergency department in the mid-west to deal with the crisis there. We had a promise of flood defences in Midleton, County Cork, in 2017 and there is not even a planning application ready to go in yet to get those flood defences built. When it comes to investment for IPAS residents, the majority of locations - 87% - in which they are housed are in the hospitality sector. A full one third of hotels outside of Dublin are now taken up with contracts with the State. There is nothing to deal with that. There is no talk about consultation and engagement with communities. The authoritarian approach by the Minister continues. The hospitality sector is on its knees, and we see pubs and restaurants close weekly. There is no talk of a VAT reduction to 9% for that sector.

One of the major problems I find with this Government is that it does not do reform, so the HSE is in major trouble regarding overspend and waste. The HSE spent €2.5 billion on compensation in the past ten years. The number of adverse incidents in the HSE is significantly increasing, which is leading to damage done to patients and high levels of compensation. However, the reason that damage is being done in the HSE is that there are too few doctors and nurses because we are in an international recruitment market and people are being paid better in Australia and Canada. The Australian Government, incredibly, is recruiting more gardaí at the moment than the Irish Government. We need to make sure that in these budgets we provide proper pay, terms and conditions for doctors, nurses and gardaí so they can live in their local communities.

The other issue I want to discuss is capacity. We need to create capacity with regard to doctors, nurses and construction workers. The way to do that is workplace planning, but that means investing in our university sector. It is incredible that right now more than 50% of the students in our medical schools are from outside the EU. The reason is that the medical schools are dependent on the high fees these students pay to keep them going. When these students finish their degrees most of them head home and we have a major problem with doctors working in our health sector as a result. We must make sure we invest properly in the university sector to get the doctors and nurses we need and to deal with falling GP numbers throughout Ireland.

Mattie McGrath (Tipperary, Independent)
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I first want to wish the best to our usher team leader, Tara Humpston. It is her first day as team leader in the Chamber. She has done a mighty job and there was not a word out of place today. We were all very quiet.

This budget is like the curate's egg - good in spots. However, there are a lot of spots in it that can go awfully bad and can turn into what we know in the country as a glugger. That is what is going to happen because of reckless spending. We have to welcome the energy tax credits. Struggling home owners need those, but we need to tackle the energy companies and the reasons we have the highest electricity prices in Europe. It is Government failure because it is in the pockets of big business - full stop, clean and simple. Giving taxpayers' money back to them to pay the bills is nonsense. You would not survive like that for one hour in a business.

Every year, we wait eagerly to hear if the help-to-buy scheme will be extended and I was glad to hear this year of a more substantial extension until 2029. However, the elephant in the room with the help-to-buy scheme is that the only people eligible are those building or buying new homes. How many new homes are really being built? That is the problem. They are not being built. This scheme has to be extended to second-hand homes, the market where people start their homes and everything else. Homes are not being built. In spite of the Government's figures and spin, it is not happening.

The support for carers is also very welcome and long overdue. We referenced the failed care referendum and the promises the Government made to look after the carers to try to force them to go and vote for it. It now shows that they are being looked after anyway, and rightly so. They deserve that, and much more, so much. The maternity increase for new babies is a wonderful initiative. The increase in that is badly wanted because there are lots of costs before and after a pregnancy, as Deputy Tóibín said.

The failure to reduce the VAT rate is appalling. Representatives of the Restaurants Association of Ireland were in here and met us all. They begged and pleaded and made a budget submission. It was a waste of paper.

Restaurants are disappearing all over the country, especially in small towns and villages in rural Ireland, at a rate of knots. The Government knows that as well but it is inept and has failed to act. Whether it was that the big hotels would not allow it to do it but the Government says it cannot have a split rate of VAT. How come other European countries can have it? It is an abject failure. Companies are under pressure with energy costs and the increase in the minimum wage will put more cost on them. There is also sick pay, new insurance measures and the mandatory pension scheme that is coming in this year. The Government is oblivious to the troubles of these companies.

I met the president of the Irish Road Haulage Association earlier. He is appalled. There is nothing for hauliers in the budget. There is not one bit of initiative, apart from putting up carbon tax and adding to the price of fuel again for them. This industry is already in trouble and we cannot do without it. Hauliers move every product we produce through the country and abroad and they got sweet you-know-what. It is so unfair.

The Government called its €400 payment for businesses the power up grant. My God, €400 is not going to power up much. It is a bit insensitive when so many businesses are struggling to keep the power on. Whoever writes these speeches for the Government had the insensitivity to call this power up. It will amount to €77 per week. That will not power up a lot in this day and age. Such audacity. That is the kind of a bubble the Government is in. It has such a false sense of security thinking it can buy votes and buy the people. The grant is for businesses paying rates of under €30,000. I have a case of a hotel in south Tipperary. Its VAT bill last year was €30,200 and it was denied the payment. In actual fact, it applied and got the payment and then had to pay it back. It is the same issue. It is not being increased either. It is so unfair that it is not a sliding scale. If a business is €200 over the threshold, it will get nothing of the €5,000 that was given this year and €4,000 last year. The Government has to be able to tweak these schemes.

There is the whole situation regarding housing and no initiatives. It is shocking. The Minister of State, Deputy Richmond, was flying kites a number of weeks ago about imposing massive stamp duty on people from abroad. As I said, bulk buyers of ten or more properties face a 10% stamp duty. The Government has increased this to 15%. It should have gone up to 40% and I will explain why. Four in every ten houses built in this country are bought by these vulture funds, investment companies or whatever we want to call them. Since the Government has come into power, the number has increased by 223%, with, as I said, four in every ten homes now being bought by these investment companies. How can ordinary people get a home? The Government can window-dress this all it likes and play around with bits and pieces of money here and there. Incidentally, it is taxpayers' money and the Government does that do them.

The increase in the carbon tax by €7.50 per tonne is another punitive measure on ordinary people, road hauliers, the agriculture industry and anybody who has to put fuel in a machine, car or anything else. As I said, there are inflationary pressures in the budget. The Government is increasing spending by 6.9%, exceeding its own recommendation of a 5% threshold. This will drive up inflation, as warned by the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council, potentially adding €250 to household costs according to the Central Bank. Yet, the Government goes along with this folly because it wants to buy the election and voters. I hope the voters will see through it and will not be so foolish. I remember in 1977 an election was bought. Other elections were also bought and we paid dearly for them.

The challenges for SMEs are enormous. The Government does not seem to get it. Across the board, it is bringing in regulation after regulation and makes things more cumbersome. A company with six or seven employees would definitely need one secretarial assistant to deal with all the regulation. It is form after form. Regulation has mushroomed; it is crazy.

As I said, the inflationary pressures on the budget are crazy. When we had a surplus and huge sums, we could do something about it and give something meaningful. As Deputy Shanahan said, we could also be a bit visionary, as the late T. K. Whitaker was, and do something with the money we have, rather than patching holes and being self-serving. Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Greens, who are going to obliterated, are trying to buy the voters to get back into power again. We have a long-term responsibility and duty of care to our people and our forefathers who built this country, supported it and put it where it is, not to fritter it away on election promises and spin. The Government has more spin doctors now than it has anything else. There are overruns and nothing can be built. It seems no project can be done by the OPW or by any of the Government's procurement companies. There are massive overruns and nothing can be done. However, the enablers, the self-employed people who want to do it, will not be let do it. It is an opportunity lost. Of course, the Ministers concerned will not even stay in the House to listen. It was the height of ignorance earlier that everybody fled from the Chamber when Sinn Féin Members were given their time.

Michael Collins (Cork South West, Independent)
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In recent days, I see Bertie Ahern had a secret meeting with Simon Harris. It is little wonder that he taught him about leaks and spins. Leaks usually come out of Fianna Fáil but they are now starting to come out of Fine Gael, with the leaks we had in recent weeks relating to the budget. It is like a bucket with no ass in it. At one time, when the budget took place nobody knew until budget day exactly what was going to happen. Everybody knew what was going to happen prior to this one. There was one thing we did not know, however, and the hospitality is absolutely furious about it. People in the sector from throughout the country are sending me messages about how they have been let down by this Government. It is an appalling travesty that the VAT rate the Government raised from 9% to 13.5% has not been decreased despite promises. Members of the VAT 9 Now group were up in Leinster House last week. I presume they were brought up here on a lick and promise. They thought the reduction was going to happen. Now, of course, Fine Gael is saying it wanted it to happen and Fianna Fáil and the Greens did not want it. That, of course, is finger-pointing, which is what happens when you are coming close to election.

What matters here is that 270,000 jobs have been put in jeopardy. Over 600 cafés and restaurants are after closing in the past few months. The sector is in a desperate situation. The lower wage being increased is always to be welcomed but that is another increase for those businesses. They have to make payouts and they cannot afford them. Fáilte Ireland will spend millions promoting this beautiful country over the next few months but what tourists will see when they come here is empty commercial buildings for sale or lease because people are closing their doors. They cannot afford to stay in business. I obviously have limited time. I would like to spend my seven and a half minutes speaking on behalf of those people. I have met them. As Deputy McGrath just mentioned, we all met them. I met Peter and Elaine from The Fish Basket in Rosscarbery, Jim Edwards from Kinsale and people from The Townhouse O D's in Schull. All these businesses are in a desperate position. They pleaded with the Government to understand that but it did not understand it. It turned its back at a time when it says the country is awash with money. It has let these businesses down shockingly. No one running these businesses or any of their employees should answer the door when these people come knocking on it for votes. This will not be forgotten.

This budget robbed Peter and paid Paul. It provides for fuel increases. It gives extra pension to the elderly, which I fully support. It reduces the USC charge but we should remember that Fine Gael promised to drop the USC altogether. It has only been decreased, so that was a false promise because it was not delivered. The charge should never have even been introduced in the first place. Then the Government turns around and gives a fuel increase. It is robbing Peter and paying Paul. The fuel increase will hurt everybody who pulls up at a filling station. It will add to 2.5 cent to the price of a litre of diesel and 2.1 cent to the price of a litre of petrol. Families cannot afford that. This budget is going to hit the working man and woman hard as usual. They are going to be penalised. These are people who have to go to work in the morning, take the kids to school and use a vehicle to get from A to B. The Government knows that is an easy catch. The cost of home heating oil and a bag of coal is going up. There is no sympathy whatsoever for those people who are going to be caught in that trap. They have little or no other choice. The Government is saying some of the carbon tax, which is only a farce to keep the Green Party happy, will help with the warmer homes scheme. Apart from those in denial, every politician knows it takes two years. It took two years before the Green Party came into government for people to get their house into the warmer home scheme. It still takes two years. It makes no odds. It is not any faster or any different.

On agriculture, what I could gather is there is a lot of talk about schemes but that is a continuation of what was already there. In one, the Government said it will look into schemes for next year's budget. What is wrong with this year's budget in relation to agriculture? Why could this year's budget not be looked into?

Fianna Fáil, the Green Party and Fine Gael decided to pursue the residential zoned land tax. It is here to stay, despite pressure from farmers heaped on TDs and Senators from the coalition parties. The surprise today from the Minister for Finance, Deputy Chambers, is that the residential zoned land tax is here to stay and the only compromise is that farmers will be given an exemption in 2025 if they seek to rezone their land. In effect, this means downsizing from a valuable residential zoning into agricultural zoning. Fianna Fáil has caved in yet again and tax-hungry Greens have put another nail in the farming coffin, but they do not care.

To be honest, I do not think I heard any Minister speak about fisheries today. It is astonishing that although we are surrounded by water, neither of the two Ministers spoke about fisheries or what aids are available for pelagic and inshore fishermen, who are experiencing serious difficulties at this time. The Ministers have turned their backs on them. I have continuously said there ought to be a stand-alone Minister for the marine, fisheries and the islands. They are forgotten; they are the forgotten people.

The Ministers said they have put extra money into the carers’ pockets and I respect that if they have done so. However, we are adamant that there should be no means test for carers. If somebody looks after a person in their home or looks after a neighbour, why are they means-tested? We are in a position where no hospital beds are available for elderly people if they need to stay long-term in hospitals. What do we do? We make sure to penalise those who try to care for others instead of supporting them. We are told we cannot have home helps for all sorts of strange reasons, and even though we are told there are plenty of hours available and plenty of funding, it is not happening on the ground. That is why the carers are another issue.

While talking about health, will there be extra funding for beds for the elderly? It is a crisis in west Cork, where people are in medical wards and cannot find a long-term nursing home or community hospital bed. West Cork has fewer beds, not more. There is also the issue of reimbursement for cataract surgery. The Minister of State, Deputy Burke, was critical of me in an article in one of the newspapers a couple of years ago for taking people to the North. Has the Government increased the reimbursement today for the people it took money from recently? I hope the Minister of State has delivered for the people of his constituency in Cork, who are in a crisis and cannot get a cataract operation in Cork, or has he turned his back on them once again?

Reference was made to funding for Uisce Éireann. Is it going to deliver? Is the money going to go to those at the top notch and none to the ground level? Is Shannonvale going to get its scheme this coming year? Is Dunmanway going to get its scheme this coming year? In Warren Beach in Rosscarbery, people are drinking raw sewage. Is it going to get its scheme? Goleen has been 25 years waiting and Shannonvale has been 29 years waiting. Are they going to get schemes or are they going to be kicked down the road, like everything else?

With regard to pensions, the Green Party claims it looks after everybody. Does it look after everybody? Where are the women's pensions in this country? Every Minister and TD in government should be called out. How many women come into my constituency office every week to say their pension has been taken from them or they never got a pension because their husband got a pension? That is an outrageous attack on the ordinary, good, hard-working women of this country. Whether they worked at home or worked outside, most of them have no pension. It is a disgrace that their pensions have been taken. The Ministers should hang their heads in shame on that issue. The women of Ireland asked me to say that.

Carol Nolan (Laois-Offaly, Independent)
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I welcome the opportunity to speak on the budget. It would be remiss of me not to acknowledge that we have seen some positive measures announced today. However, my overall sense is that these measures are short-term and are reflective of the short-term thinking of the Government. In other words, they are electioneering, and that is the only way that many people are looking at this, unfortunately.

Given the limited time I have, I can only speak in general terms on most items. What I will say is that taxpayers and citizens are being dazzled by this magpie’s budget, with its nest full of shiny policy objects, but all that glitters is not gold, as we well know. The Irish Fiscal Advisory Council, for example, has repeatedly warned that the Government is breaching its own national spending rule in the billions of euro it is allocating to spending and tax cuts. In fact, we know from data provided by the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council that because of this approach, consumer prices will be 1.9% higher cumulatively due to the breaches of the rule. In real terms, this equates to adding €1,000 to typical yearly household outgoings. Is this the mark of fiscal responsibility so treasured by Fine Gael?

While there is a lot of fiscal smoke and mirrors going on, we also need to be realistic. I understand this from a political perspective. Budget day is political theatre and very little else. This year, it is the theatre of the absurd. We have record levels of financial surplus and we are awash with cash, but our national debt is an eye-watering €200 billion. What have we to show for that? Our services are creaking at the seams, disabled children are unable to access basic services and the sick are being forced abroad in record numbers to access basic healthcare that they cannot access here in a timely fashion. Children and adults in my constituency of Laois-Offaly cannot find a dentist or GP. If this is progress, then stop the train because we badly need to reverse course. In Offaly alone, there are now 81 people waiting for GP assignment. At the end of this Government's tenure, we have a homelessness and housing crisis that is an affront to man and God. We are one of the richest nations on earth, according to some assessments, but our single greatest asset, our children and young people, are being squeezed financially or forced abroad.

Until the dying minutes of its regime and through its own sheer gutlessness, the Government has refused to face up to the measures needed to reduce the vast numbers involved in illegal inward migration. It has allowed the growth of an entirely new phenomenon, the asylum-industrial complex. This is draining billions from the taxpayer, with estimates that Government costs are now running at over €5 million per day just to maintain a socially catastrophic policy. It is the most expensive virtue-signalling policy in history.

Our farmers’ incomes have been decimated. It is disappointing to see that despite the small measures, not enough has been done for farmers. Hauliers have again been let down and are facing an increase in fuel costs and carbon tax. The hauliers and farmers are the backbone of our rural economy, as are the small restaurants and cafés that still have to endure a 13.5% VAT rate. Since last September, 577 restaurants and cafés have closed their doors and, unfortunately, we are going to see many more close their doors. This is because of the short-term thinking of the Government. Spending was not targeted at employers or the businesses that create so much employment. I am speaking in particular of rural Ireland, where the hauliers, farmers, small cafés, restaurants and hairdressers were hit by the refusal of the Government to reduce the VAT rate. We need these people. I again call for something to be done.

Giving businesses energy credits and other small, tokenistic measures is not going to work in the long term and is actually letting the energy companies off the hook. It is not right. I have called a number of times for the energy companies to be brought before us to be told to stop the profiteering. The Government could do that if it had the political will to do it.

I believe the Government will make farmers’ lives even more difficult because of the fact they are being forced to meet green targets. The shiny green policy is only deepening the economic assault on Irish farmers who, as I said, are the backbone of our economy but are not getting enough support. As the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council notes, if the State does not achieve a timely green transition, it faces substantial non-compliance costs. We need to stop the madness. We need to stop billions of euro of taxpayers’ money being wasted and squandered on green policy when the Government is leaving businesses very much alone and unsupported.

Danny Healy-Rae (Kerry, Independent)
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I thank the Government for the increases in social welfare, which mean a lot to people who are on the breadline, such as pensioners, people with disabilities and so on. However, the word from Kerry, which I represent, is that many people in the tourism sector are very disappointed that the VAT rate was not reduced to 9%. Many providers in the nooks and corners in all the different places of Kerry are very disappointed. Many of them were waiting for this reduction and hoping they could survive, but many have closed already and many more will close.

There are increases in rates and in wages, and the Government was boasting about the minimum wage.

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It is the employers who have to pay that, as they have to pay all of the other wages. That is a fact. The Government keeps saying that the rates are the doing of the local authorities. No, the local authorities are just the collectors. Tailte Éireann sets the rates.

The costs of electricity have gone up every whole day since the Government closed Bord na Móna. Now, the State is importing woodchip from South America into Shannon Foynes Port and transporting it up to Offaly to keep the generating station going. There is importation of briquettes from Germany and Lithuania. So much for carbon footprint. No matter how much the Government raises the carbon tax, it will still not change the weather. Ireland is now the most expensive country for fuel in Europe after today.

On the health service, people in Kerry who get sick are being constantly medically compromised. There are 50 posts for nurses and carers in University Hospital Kerry, UHK, which are not filled. Killarney Community Nursing Unit has six posts which are not filled. In Kenmare Community Nursing Unit, many beds are not even opened even though the new hospital is open since 2012. In Dingle there are three posts vacant and in Cahirsiveen there are two posts vacant. In the Government's budget, it said that it would provide more beds. It cannot provide the beds if it does not provide nurses and carers. That is what is wrong. Many beds are still empty in Kerry tonight because they do not have the nurses and carers to staff them. That is the gospel truth.

GPs are constantly under pressure because the immigrant population has increased in Killarney and in different places around the Ring of Kerry.

The Government has reduced the reimbursements for cataracts and many patients may lose their eyesight if they cannot afford to go to Belfast. On the delay in ambulances, the baby in Castleisland in recent days who stopped breathing would have had to wait for an hour and a half only for the mother got someone to drive her child to UHK. That is not satisfactory.

Nurses and carers who came out of retirement to work for the HSE are now being told that they have to pay back some of their pensions but if they worked for private providers, they do not have to pay it back at all. The Government must look at that.

On our motion, the Minister indicated that he will increase the cap for carers. That will not happen until next July. We asked the Government to do away with the means testing. That is all we asked. They deserve that.

The increase in carbon tax today further exasperates everyone who has to use a car to go to work, increasing costs for lorries and commercial vehicles and the transporting of food, essential goods and supplies, and the transporting of agricultural products. Passenger bus hire and taxis will also be impacted. The carbon tax is also pricing vehicles off the road.

There is very little money for roads in Kerry. With the widening of the footpaths, it is narrowing the roads. On the Rock Road in Killarney, the thoroughfare is reduced and to compound it, the road going up Spa Cross that serves Kilcummin, Tiernaboul and Gneevgullia, where people come all the way down that road, is being narrowed. That is ordained by the Green Party and is the price for having them as partners in government. It was the other Government parties who picked them. The road will collapse now because the lorries will have to go up on the footpaths and put the bicycles out on the road because the road is narrow now in many places with the two sets of footpaths and cycle ways on either side of the road.

The Killarney bypass is 24 years in the waiting. Blackwater Bridge to Sneem was built for horses and carts over 200 years ago. In the local roads, the local improvement scheme, LIS, scheme has 660 such roads still on the waiting list. Farmers who were promised their agri climate rural environment scheme, ACRES, payments had to wait six months or more. The costs of diesel and for all services are going up all of the time leaving many struggling to survive. The nitrates derogation and rules and regulations are driving farmers into the ground.

Farmers who wish to supply the grid from solar energy are held up by the ESB as their infrastructure, lines and transformers are not adequate. Farmers were told it could produce 60% to 80% of their own power and are now told that they can only provide 30% to 40%.

On infrastructure, sewerage and water treatment plants, Kenmare is waiting over 12 years and Beaufort is waiting seven or eight years before progress is made to put it out to tender. This is what people have to put up with. Scartaglin and Currow have no treatment plant and share systems. Brosna and Moyvane cannot even build one other house until the treatment plant is upgraded.

At the same time we are spending billions of euro on immigrants. Some €2 billion has been spent this year and €3 billion to €4 billion over the past two years. We are not even sure where many of these have come from and we are entitled to know that. It will be a great country if we can stick it.

We are squandering money and spending €336,000 for a bicycle shed and almost €1.5 million for a hut. We cannot even do the necessary river cleaning to protect our homes or our roads.

I welcome the hot meals programme that is being introduced and I welcome any improvement to the bus transport service but there is no clarity in the Minister's statement as to what is going to happen there.

I am very worried and concerned about the Social, Personal and Health Education, SPHE, curriculum that is being ordained by this Government and the Minister. Many concerned parents have contacted me regarding the new SPHE curriculum, have asked for a stop to be put to it and for the carrying out of an urgent review of the explicit content. This is sexual exploitation of children and there is something wrong when the schools are telling the children not to tell their parents what is happening inside those classes.

Michael Healy-Rae (Kerry, Independent)
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There is plenty of money here but no plan. I am not going to vote for this budget because I am standing up for the hospitality sector in County Kerry, the tourism capital of the western world that the Minister of State and her Government has totally abandoned here today. How in the name of God can the Government say this to the hoteliers, to the vintners, to the restaurant people and to the people who work so hard? I am talking about County Kerry because the people there have been contacting me yesterday, last week and last month. We have been lobbying the Government. We asked, pleaded and begged the Government but to no good. The Government turned around and abandoned them. Some 615 restaurants have closed in the past year. A measly grant will be provided to businesses which will be eaten up by the wage increases. I am not against the increase in the wages but they do have a ripple effect on employers. It is putting businesses under increasing pressure because of all of the other input costs they have.

The Government is still charging the rates which it has increased and for which it is directly responsible for. The energy costs are of course affected by the carbon tax increases and this is putting enterprises out of business. I am saying to the people in Kerry that I am not voting for the Government because it did not back the people. I was around the Ring of Kerry last night and everywhere I was going, they were saying that maybe the Government will not abandon them. The message is that the Government has abandoned them.

On social welfare increases, of course the increases that have been put there are very welcome. I ask why yesterday, and I am only one Member inside here, had I four hard-working women, people who are getting older and who had a pension, and had their pension was taken off them? At a time when the Government has to pipe the money out of their way, it cut the pensions of those four women in Kerry yesterday. They are left with nothing and are now relying on one pension going into the house, that of their husband. Has the Government got something against women, where it picks on the women's pension? Why? We had it before with the Labour Party where it went after women's pensions and now this Government is going after women's pensions. I do not know what problem it has with women.

On carers, we had a recent motion in this House which many of us supported to abolish the means test for the carer's allowance but the Government chose not to do that today. Why? What has it against the people who give care to other people? The Government increased the means test threshold to €625 for a single person and €1,250 for a couple instead of abolishing the means test. The carer's support grant got an increase of €2.80 per week. That is shameful. The newborn grant, the €420 payment, is of course welcome.

Does anybody in government realise the cost of having a baby in Ireland today, the cost of getting set up, the cost of taking care of a baby and bringing them into the world? I am afraid the Government does not have much of an idea of that either.

On health, there are 455 replacement beds and 160 new community beds. How many are actually open? Beds in Kenmare, Dingle and many of our other community hospitals remain closed in state-of-the-art hospitals. Where will the staff come from to open these new beds? The difficulty in recruitment and retention of nurses due to bad pay and conditions is leaving a massive hole in our health service. Why are we exporting all our lovely young people? There are boys and girls who might want to or are qualified to work in the health sector but they cannot because the Government will not pay them properly and will not do anything to keep them. The Government is talking about opening beds but who will man them and who will service them?

There are 600,000 additional home help hours. Every one of us inside here knows that a person can apply for home help and can be approved for it and then he or she will go on a waiting list. Then the person is given an apology and told there is no one available to provide the care in that person's home. I commend and thank the people who are working in home help in County Kerry today. I know many of them. I put down questions in the Dáil supporting them and trying to get proper recognition from the Government for them but the Government does not do that. Every chance it gets, it cuts their little bit of mileage. The Government held it up once and would not even pay them, telling them that it would give it to them some other time. It was a battle to get that out of the Government for them. Why would the Government do that to people? It did that. It cannot claim it did not because it did. We spoke about it here in the Dáil. I was defending those people. Shame on the Government for what it is doing to the people who are doing an important job.

As for farmers, there are no incentives for young people to start farming and no incentives for older farmers to retire. The Government still fails to recognise that fact. We need to put proper supports in there. As for the residential zoned land tax, I was the first person to raise that issue in here when it came to the fore, in County Kerry in particular, about what the Government was doing to farmers. The Government is now saying the tax is still there but that farmers can apply for an exemption. The Government is still putting them to trouble, worry and expense. These are just people who, because of where their land is located and because they still continue farming, are being treated as though it is a massive asset and that they will start building houses. It is growing grass they want, not building housing.

With regard to housing and 10,000 new social houses, how many will be allocated to be built in County Kerry and, importantly, when will we finally get an affordable housing scheme in Kerry? More than 200 social housing units are being provided in Killarney town by an approved housing body. I welcome that and they are under construction. It is great news but when will we have something by way of affordable housing for young people? Every day, in places like Killarney, Tralee, Killorglin, Cahersiveen and Sneem, young people ask me why will we not do something to provide homes they can buy.. They are not looking for them for nothing but they want them to be affordable. There is the help-to-buy scheme for the first-time buyers but second-hand properties are not included yet again. When will the Government wake up and realise that a first-time buyer is a first-time buyer whether the house is brand new or second-hand? This is not very complicated. If the Government were to listen to this it is very easy to understand.

Of course tax relief is the thing that people would shout about. In case anybody says that I have a conflict of interest, of course I am declaring my interest but when it comes to tax relief and the people who provide accommodation, why do they not get some form of incentive, such as that put in place for the Ukrainian people whereby people could get €100 a month tax free? Why do we not have the same thing for Irish people? Why do we not have tax incentives for people who are providing accommodation for Irish people? Why should it be one for one and none for the other? That does not make sense and it is not fair.

With regard to roads, I am glad to see an extra €400 million for the Department of Transport. I had to come in here last week begging and scraping to seek to get back the roads that had been taken off, or should we say shelved? I am very glad that those have gone back now to Kerry County Council and are going to tender. I welcome it. It is the road up to Bunane and the road below it to Kinacross and out into Fossa and Faha. There are schemes that are back on the road now again, thankfully, but the Government did not want to do it because the Greens wanted to take them off. When will the crumbling national road sector in Kerry benefit? The N21 from Tralee through Castleisland and up to the county bounds is in seriously poor repair. The surface of the N23 from Farranfore to Castleisland is very poor. The N70 Ring of Kerry road and, of course, Tahilla to Blackwater is a disgrace. I travelled it last night at 1.30 a.m. before coming here this morning and could not close my eyes - although there was no fear of falling asleep - because of the rattling and the banging going along in the car. We also need to properly fund local improvement schemes.

Richard O'Donoghue (Limerick County, Independent)
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I would like to put forward a question to the people in Ireland and to all the different generations of people who have voted for Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, the Green Party and other parties. I ask them today whether their children and grandchildren are for sale because that is what this budget is. The Government is trying to buy the votes of those who have voted for those parties for decades. I will break it down for the people of Ireland who have voted for those parties for years and ask them again why they are going to sell out their children and their grandchildren.

First, there are the fuel costs. The Government has raised the cost of fuel with the carbon tax. What does that mean to people in Ireland? On one side the Government is giving them an increase - and I welcome all the increases being given - but on the other side I want to see people being able to withstand the increases so they do not have to raise their prices. Let us take transport, for example. Everything that comes here and there to every household in Ireland uses transport. The Government has increased a carbon tax for every person who has a vehicle in this country. It includes the haulage sector, the person who goes out working and who has to drive to work because there is no transport network, the taxi service and the private bus operator. The Government has just taxed every single one across the country in carbon tax. The Government has already taken 50% of fuel costs in taxes and it has gone past that now in taxes.

There is also an effect to the raising of the minimum wage, a raise which I welcome. As an employer myself I welcome it but on the other side, one must look at the people who have to sustain the increases. How are they going to sustain the increases in the hospitality sector, for instance? We asked the Government to reduce the VAT rate from 13.5% to 9%. The Government brought them up here all last week or the week before and said it was going to do something for them. They now know that there are two standards to the Government. It will bring them up, hoping for the best, but will send them home. That 13.5% VAT rate means the hospitality sector and all the small cafes and small restaurants that are putting people through college and helping them go through college also now face an increase in wages. While I welcomed this measure, the Government has given the sector nothing to sustain it. What have they got to do now? They must pass the costs onto people coming into their restaurants to eat. They must put up the price of a cup of coffee. The last time the Government raised the VAT rate from 9% to 13.5% it put 70 cent onto the price a cup of coffee. It put €4 onto a plate of food and now the Government has done it again. Not only has the Government crippled the businesses that are trying to employ people in this country it is now putting them out of business. Last year, 615 businesses went out of business. I want to ask people from every one of the Government parties, when they are visiting Limerick or Galway, to go around to the people in the hospitality sector and ask them if they are happy with the Government. They are not going to be happy. The Government parties have come up here for decades doing the same thing but they have destroyed the people who actually put in the work and built communities and villages.

Reference was made to infrastructure but the infrastructure is only built in populated areas. The Minister of State, Deputy O'Donnell, might go around Limerick. For 40 years they have been waiting for an upgrade on the sewage system in Askeaton. Two thirds of Limerick, including Oola, Kilfinane and Dromcolliher - I will go through all of them if the Minister of State likes - have sewage systems that are defunct. For decades, the Government has been saying it was going to put money into infrastructure. Now it talks about infrastructure today through Uisce Éireann. I asked Uisce Éireann last month for a breakdown on funding that was put into the scheme in Croom, County Limerick. I got an email back today that €5 million had been spent in upgrading a water pipe to Croom for the surrounding areas. They have been bringing in truckloads of water for the last month and putting it into the pipes to keep water in the pipes at a cost of €200,000. That is what it has cost. Uisce Éireann is leaking at the seams and yet the Government keeps pumping money into it. It is not value for money.

Consider the sports capital grants, again which I welcome.

Every sports capital grant application is done by volunteers, putting the paperwork together to seek funding. Everything they do in their criteria is value for money. Why? It is because they have to meet the Government criteria. However, if the Government does any infrastructure, such as a bike shed costing €336,000 or €1.4 million for a security hut, it goes over budget on every single thing. The children's hospital is an example of the lack of accountability from any person in government. That is a problem.

We now go to the health sector. I welcome the increases that came for the carers but they asked the Government to do away with the means test. Again, the Government failed them. What did the Government do on the other side? For carers who have to travel around the country, the Government decided to give an increase here but to take it back from them in carbon tax. This takes it back from people in their day-to-day living, buying groceries, with the tax on the trucks that bring the food to shops. It is a tax on people driving to work and collecting their children. It is all about tax. This is what the Government has done. It has taken it from the poor to give it to the rich, when it should be the other way around. The Government should be protecting the people. It has no concept of what can be built in a community and what a community can deliver. There is no accountability on the part of the Government.

Let us look at the hospital service and UHL in particular. I have been here for five years giving out about UHL. The Government has now finally set up an investigation into six people in the hospital. Some €56 million has been wasted on legal fees fighting cases, when the Government should just have admitted there was something wrong and attempted to fix it. During those five years, Aoife Johnston has passed away, God rest her soul. The case of Jessica Sheedy in Limerick has been waiting six years for an investigation. During this time, someone is being fully paid while the investigation is going on and the Government has not brought this up. Every time they look at something, it has been delayed. There is no accountability.

Today, I listened to the two Ministers giving their speeches and they mentioned farming. Then they mentioned carbon tax. The same people who are trying to help us with carbon - the foresters - are thrown to the wolves with the ash dieback problem. Eamon Ryan wants to let the wolves run around the countryside. The people who have been affected by ash dieback have been failed by the Government with the importation of trees. These people have been offered a measly €2,000 per acre to get rid of the forestry they have and replant it, after 30 years. The people who are trying to protect the planet have been screwed over by the Government with taxes. Are the children and grandchildren of the people who have voted for Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael for decades for sale for the sake of a couple of euros in a budget made by civil servants for civil servants?

Seán Ó Fearghaíl (Kildare South, Ceann Comhairle)
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We now go to the Independent Group. Deputy Thomas Pringle to begin and he is sharing time with his colleagues.

Thomas Pringle (Donegal, Independent)
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I have said this in every one of my budget speeches over the last three years but I find this whole debate a bit of a farce. We knew exactly what would be in the budget long before it was laid before us. I read the full breakdown of budget measures in The Irish Times yesterday, which is beyond ridiculous. Why do we continue with the farce of a budget day special when it is all out there already anyway?

I find it very cynical of the Government to manufacture a week's worth of budget coverage to distract from its many failings, as well as other important issues. I am sure it suits the Minister, Deputy Donohoe, to have the budget this week, as well as all the pre-budget coverage last week, to distract from his secret call to assure the Israeli finance minister that the Government would block the occupied territories Bill. This is a disgraceful and deceitful move by the Minister and one that will not be forgotten over a package of one-off measures, because that is all this budget amounts to. It is not the systematic change that is so desperately needed. It is just a lacklustre repeat of the previous years' budgets, with very little for the public to be truly hopeful about.

The budget offers absolutely nothing in the way of long-term change or improved access to services. It merely throws out a couple of euro to everyone in the audience, including those who do not require it, in a desperate attempt to keep as many people as possible happy in an election year. When the Government took this approach three years ago, its argument was that a targeted approach would take time to figure out and ensure. Yet, this excuse falls flat when the Government continues to throw money at those who will not even notice its presence and refuses to ensure targeted measures and funding are aimed at those struggling to get by. It is disgraceful that the budget treats both these groups the same. This is far from the equitable society the Minister promised.

For starters, this document does nothing to actively address the worst housing and homelessness crisis in the history of the State. We have recorded more than 14,000 homeless people in the country. The Simon Communities of Ireland, in its recent report entitled Hidden Homelessness, revealed that hidden homelessness impacts a further 30,000 across the island of Ireland. There is no affordable housing available for those looking to buy a home. Any TD who spends time in his or her constituency office will know this. House prices will only continue to rise. In Donegal, prices in the third quarter of 2024 were 12% higher than a year previously. The average price of a home in Donegal is now 65% above the level of that at the start of the Covid 19 pandemic. The Government's responses are to increase the threshold so that fewer people will have to pay inheritance tax and to extend the help-to-buy scheme. This scheme does nothing but push up house prices and very few people are actually even eligible for the scheme, given that it only intended for houses built after 2017. One will find very few houses built after 2017 in rural Ireland and so the Government's claim that it is helping all first-time buyers is just not true. Builders are the ones being helped by this scheme.

The first home shared equity scheme is just as ineffective because it only applies to new-build houses. However, the budget 2025 expenditure report details that a further €80 million will be spent on the scheme, while, shockingly, only a meagre €21 million will be spent on Traveller-specific accommodation and just €70 million will be set aside for the remediation of homes affected by the defective concrete blocks and apartment defects. Some €210 million is needed to ensure a 100% redress for homeowners affected by defective blocks alone. Despite this, there is not a single mention of the defective blocks' scheme in the budget. This is a disgrace and shows that the Government has no compassion for affected homeowners.

Neither does it seem to have care for the one in two people in Ireland who will experience a mental health difficulty, either directly or indirectly. Mental health was not a priority in last year's budget and barely got a mention, despite the fact that just €1 spent on mental health returns €18 to the State. I am disappointed but not surprised to see that this year's budget is not much better. Again, allocated funding for mental health is far below any other health funding. It is clear that the Government does not take mental health seriously enough. I welcome the intended funding for Traveller mental health initiatives but we have to ensure that this funding goes directly to the National Traveller Mental Health Network as is actually drawn down and used for its intended purpose, unlike Traveller-specific accommodation funding. We need to ensure a more equitable healthcare system and move away from the two-tiered system currently in place and which is encouraged by these Government policies.

Our disabled community has also, once again, been let down by this budget. We know that significant additional costs are faced by people with disabilities, which are not met by existing social welfare payments. Yet, the Government continues to contribute to a national savings account, instead of increasing payments sufficiently or establishing a permanent cost-of-disability payment. I and many DPOs have been calling for this measure for years. It should not be the case that thousands of disabled children and adults are unable to access basic support services and equipment, with this being accepted and left unaddressed. We need to establish a permanent cost-of-disability payment of at least €50 per week for disabled people and we need to abolish the means test for carers entirely. If the Minister, Deputy Chambers, meant it in his speech when he said that carers play a fundamental role in our society, then he should put his money where his mouth is.

The Irish National Teachers Organisation has advised that we need to invest in smaller class sizes. Reducing class sizes by two points has shown an improvement in student outcomes and allows teachers to deliver a quality education. We have also emphasised the need to restore the 1,700 assistant principal roles that were cut during the austerity period more than 12 years ago. This would improve school management and teacher retention. We also need to ensure a 20% increase in core grants, that is, the capitation and minor works grants, alongside increased ancillary services funding to meet the growing costs faced by schools.

We also need to invest heavily in childcare to support working families. This budget has provided a 24% increase in funding for childcare, but this extra allocation is to account for the growing number of children in the system and will not bring down the extortionate fees that parents have to pay. In his budget speech, the Minister for Finance proudly stated that almost three quarters of our working-age population is now in employment with participation by female workers at the highest level ever. This does not take into account the fact that many parents and many mothers are forced to work, given that two incomes are now required to buy a house and to get by in this country. This is not something to be proud of. I would bet that many workers would rather not be faced with the equivalent of a second mortgage to pay to access work and childcare. I was glad to see the additional allocation for foster carers but more funding should be targeted at the children as well as the carers. Carers are supporting the needs of children from their own funds and Tusla is happy for this to continue. Significant investment is needed to ensure that the rights of every child and carer are upheld and that they have equal opportunities to thrive and achieve the best possible outcomes.

The public is not interested in yet another piecemeal budget.

They want a roof over their head, access to services and to live in a country that is fair and equitable, where child poverty is eradicated and where everyone has a place to sleep that they can call home. Citizens know that Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are not interested in delivering that and so will look to see what they can personally gain from the budget as the Government attempts to buy their support.

Michael Fitzmaurice (Roscommon-Galway, Independent)
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I welcome the opportunity to speak on the budget. Like most Deputies, I welcome the increases for carers and our elderly. Childcare supports and the €2,000 increase in the threshold before entering the higher tax bracket are also welcome. Nobody will be against these changes. The only problem is that today is a day when the Government has a lot of money. We did not have a fraction of it in 2013, 2014 or 2015. When you spend money, you need to spend it wisely. All the things I have mentioned needed money. I have gone through some of the budget measures. We are trying to go through all of the figures at the moment. I hope there are increased budgets for disabilities, children with autism and mental health because we are seeing major problems in those areas around the country and we need to help those people in society.

On the other side of this budget, we need infrastructure. I am talking about roads, rail and Irish Water, which I see has got €1 billion. I believe that is for day-to-day running. For the number of houses we are talking about building, €1 billion is like peanuts to a monkey. If we are talking about building that number of houses, that sum will not cover the sewerage and water infrastructure, roads and so on that we will need to put in. That is right around the country because there are a lot of areas where the sewerage system needs upgrading. I heard someone on the radio today asking how we will spend all of this money we have. The fact is, over the past six months, 350 workers have been let go by two of the companies that do sewers and water for Irish Water because they had no money to spend. That is it. There are no ifs or buts about it. All those people were let go six months ago because the budgets were gone. We can put all the money we want towards housing but, at the end of the day, if you do not have that beginning in place, you are not going to get it done.

What are the parts of the budget where I see a vision? We need a vision of where we are going. We need to build a vision for the youth of this country. It has been said on numerous occasions that there are 100,000 fewer youngsters under 40 who own houses now than there were ten or 15 years ago. That is a frightening statistic because they cannot afford it. We can have all the money in the world but it is like the HSE. We could throw all the money in the world into the HSE but if we do not have good managers to manage things and if we do not get value for money, we are wasting it. It is like throwing it into a bonfire on 23 June.

While it was before the Minister of State's time, we have seen the likes of the modular homes. Modular homes are costing €445,000. Let us call it what it is; it is a half a house. It is 600 sq. ft. Houses in Dublin are smaller than those down the country. They are between 1,050 sq. ft and 1,200 sq. ft. We think they are dear and, by God, they are but around €600,000 will buy you one. However, if two modular houses have to be joined together, which are a half a house each, to make what we have in Dublin, we are at nearly €900,000 and may as well give up on it because it is like throwing money into a bonfire. It is absolutely disgusting to see that happening in Ireland. I recall bringing a company out to Coolock to meet the Minister, Deputy Darragh O'Brien. This company was able to bring units from Germany and to supply them for between €70,000 and €80,000. Let no one tell me the ground works will not be done on that. It should be borne in mind that the sites are being supplied by councils around the country. It would be better to build a proper house than to go on with this craic. Someone has to call a stop to this type of waste. We should be getting three units for that €445,000 rather than one. We cannot keep going down that road. It is like winning the lotto, losing your head and going off. People have won the lotto and then run out of money. That is the problem. We are doing the same thing.

There is no value for money and no accountability, no more than with that hospital down the road. Everyone can give out about it but the bottom line is that we have given a contract and it is a licence to print money for the contractor. We can give out about it and do whatever else we want but that is it. We will hear it said that this, that and the other is to be done but we cannot introduce deviations. If you offer someone something, you should draw it up right and say this is what we want and that is it. Otherwise, you can offer a design and build contract and that is it. You meet the fixed price or it is a case of "Goodbye, you are gone".

The other part of this budget relates to the agricultural sector. On a day when we had billions of euro to throw around the place, I looked at the agricultural estimates. There is approximately €100 million in measures but some of them are regurgitated. There is a bit for sheep, a bit for the forgotten farmer and a bit for the calf welfare scheme but it is small money at €5 million, €10 million or €8 million. I saw everyone below at the ploughing a few weeks ago. Politicians that would be seen on TikTok were putting their arms around the farmers. They were the greatest thing since the sliced pan when these politicians could see 200,000 of them when an election was coming up. The farmers got their answer today, however. They got a kick in the ass from this Government. Today's budget does not respect farmers. Wages in the Department are up 10%, which is something like €30 million. There are also running costs and all of that. That is fine. I do not have a problem with it but, at the end of the day, when we see the money that is being kicked around today, we have to think about the farming sector. Nothing has been done for the suckler herd, which has fallen by 40,000 cows. Damn all has been done for the sheep sector, which is down 6%. Do we have any vision for young farmers in this country? Does the Government know what we will do for them? We will give them a few small bits but we will raise the carbon tax to make sure that, when they go out with the tractor, where there is no electric one, they will get screwed a bit more. That is not the way to treat the agricultural sector.

There was talk about this five-year taxation thing in the agricultural sector. I agree with it but what do we see today? We are going to set up a crowd to look at this for the budget in 2025. Do you know what? Is there to be an election before then? It all depends. That may go out the window depending on the programme for government.

I welcome the measure on land rezoning. I agree with it. People do not get butter on both sides of their bread, to be very blunt about it. I agree with that. Farmers who want to farm should be left farming. I agree with that 100%.

It is a very disappointing day when we see that something like 5.5 million farmers have left the sector in Europe in 15 years. Today, we had an opportunity to give a bit of light to youngsters in farming, to try to get them into it, to make the sector more productive and to give an incentive to older farmers to retire. Do we want a farmer to just be going from the farm to the church? That is what we are looking at because the Government wants to keep them working like hell all their lives. People can retire from every other job but, unfortunately, no retirement scheme has been brought in for this sector. It is a disappointing day for the whole agricultural sector. I know there is a bit for the grain men but look at the price of grain today. Everyone is talking about how we are importing stuff. If we do not want to import it, let us get our own to grow it. Let us give the people growing grain right around the country the incentive to grow it. That is how to do it.

I will be talking about this more over the next few days, but I wish to let Deputy Joan Collins talk now.

Joan Collins (Dublin South Central, Independents 4 Change)
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My contribution will be an overview of the budget and its context. It was a huge opportunity for the Government to examine the fundamentals in our society that need to be addressed. Instead, this budget is the final nail in the coffin for any idea that Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Green Party Government has any plans or intentions to address the problems the country is facing. They are throwing money at people and hoping they will not realise that when these once-off payments are gone - even though they are welcome and anybody getting a double childcare payment twice before Christmas will welcome it - there will still not be enough houses, doctors, services or baseline money coming into people's pockets to allow them to live a decent life in this country.

The Government parties have tried to buy the next election, but in the process they have given up any pretence to have answers for anyone struggling to make ends meet. They are giving once-off payments in an attempt to distract from the fact that the Government is playing catch up with itself after decades of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael Governments that have left a State collapsing under the strain of cuts, privatisation and bank bailouts. We have a surplus of €25 billion that could have been used to target any one of the crises that have developed under the two parties' decades of rule. With that money, we could build tens of thousands of homes under a State-run housing development agency. We could develop a world-leading mental health service or eliminate child poverty and homelessness. We build the services and infrastructure this country is screaming out for. Instead, fundamentally, we get once-off payments that might keep some people's heads above water, but when those payments are gone, how many people will the Government leave who will be living pay cheque to pay cheque or social welfare payment to social welfare payment and struggling without the services or homes we all need?

This budget is a last hurrah of five years of failure by this Government to implement the changes the country needs. Housing prices and rents are still going up while the Government plays catch up with the delivery of social housing, which has been abandoned for decades under the watch of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. We have a health service with recruitment freezes while the Government allows skyrocketing overspend on what might be the most expensive hospital ever built. We have public services that are falling apart at the seams. The Government has made it clear again and again that it lacks the political will to address these problems. It has given up. It does not have a plan. It had no real intention in the first place.

In his speech, the Minister for Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Reform, Deputy Donohoe, called eliminating child poverty an absolute priority for this Government. More than 250,000 young children and their families are under the poverty line. The rates of children living in material deprivation and at risk of poverty have risen since 2020 under the Government. This budget was an opportunity to try to resolve these issues. It is, of course, welcome that the hot schools meal programme will be extended to all primary school children and that children aged under nine will not be paying bus fares. However, the ESRI published an extremely detailed roadmap for eliminating child poverty in its third annual report on poverty last year. The Government has failed on every single one of the measures that the ESRI studied. There is no significant increase for a qualified child, no significant increase to the working family payment, no second tier of child benefit and none of the measures that everyone knows we need to take to make a meaningful impact on child poverty rates.

Let us not forget that we have record child homelessness, with an increase of more than 60% since the Government took power. The Ombudsman for Children has called child homelessness a traumatic breach of the rights of children. Is that the record of dealing with child poverty that the Government is celebrating? I do not know what world the members of the Government live in when they stand up here and pat themselves on the back when they have failed by every measure to take any real targeted action on child homelessness or child poverty in this budget. It has abandoned thousands upon thousands of children to deprivation and homelessness. Children are spending their childhoods in hotel rooms or emergency accommodation, with nowhere else to live. Children are growing up seeing their parents struggling to keep them fed, keep them warm and keep them clothed as wages and social welfare do not rise to meet the cost of living. The Government is patting itself on the back for leaving the most vulnerable behind while it gives tax cuts to multimillionaires.

Those children need targeted supports. Children on scoliosis waiting lists, on waiting lists for surgery or waiting for additional needs assessments need targeted supports. People with disabilities need the implementation of the cost of disability report. Instead, everybody gets a bump. Whether it is a child growing up in poverty or a multimillionaire, they get the same. These once-off allocations could have been done with the €25 billion surplus and there would still have been enough revenue increases to make real interventions and to make transformational change in people's lives.

In my area, we have staff in a primary care centre on Old County Road telling older people referred from hospitals that they have no idea what they are being referred to the centre for because it does not have a single public health nurse to deal with them. In Dublin 8 and Dublin 12, there are no early childhood checks because there are no public health nurses. This budget will not give Dublin 8 and Dublin 12 more public health nurses. There is a geographical health deprivation in our area in respect of public health nurses, and I have raised that matter time and time again. I have people coming to me concerning broken sewage pipes in the back gardens and on public roads, and they have been told by Irish Water that it cannot help them this year and they will be put on a waiting list to perhaps get help to them in 2025. These problems would have been dealt with under the local authorities by their water workers before the advent of Irish Water. People would not have been left in this situation with Irish Water saying it does not have the resources.

The budget will not change the long-term economic situation for a woman I am dealing with. She has been working for a State-supported entity for the past 14 years and has not had any real pay increases over those years. She went to the Workplace Relations Commission, WRC, as the statutory body to assist in resolving workplace disputes and complaints. The service is fully funded by the public through the Exchequer. The Government set it up as a voluntarist approach to industrial relations. The WRC adjudicated that this woman would get an increase from €14 to €14.85 per hour from 1 April 2023, but the Government's State-supported entity is refusing to pay her. The Government's budget and its policies will not fundamentally change her situation.

I am also dealing with a woman stuck in one room in her parents' house. Every TD is dealing with these issues every day in their constituency offices. People have been on the housing list waiting list for 15 to 18 years waiting to get a three-bedroom house or apartment. None are being built so they are still languishing on the waiting list. Thousands of children are also waiting for medical care, surgeries, assessments of need and school places. This budget will leave them where they are. I have lost count of the number of people coming to my office who cannot find a home, cannot make the rent, cannot get anywhere on the housing list or are being evicted. This budget will do nothing for them. The Housing Commission called for an increase in the size of the social and cost-rental housing sectors to 20% of the national housing stock. The Government has budgeted for 10,000 new social houses next year, which is a drop in the ocean and it is not even an increase on last year.

We are a wealthy country but working-class people see none of it. The top 1% in Ireland owns €232 billion in wealth, whereas the bottom 50% of the population owns only €9 billion in wealth. That level of inequality cannot go on. It is ruining people's lives. There is a deep need for change so ordinary people can get their fair share.

Over the past five years, the Government has proved time and time again that it has no interest in bringing about this change. Decades of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael Governments, propped up by the Green Party and the Labour Party, have left Ireland as a country where the rich keep accumulating more wealth and everybody else struggles to get by. What we need is a Government that will not govern for the wealthy. Ireland is one of the richest countries in the world, with budget surpluses of tens of billions of euro. We need a Government with the political will to do something with the money. What this budget has made clear is that the Government has given up. It is not going to resolve the housing crisis. It is not going to fix our health service. It is not going to change anything fundamentally and it thinks that people are stupid enough to forget all about this if they get a tax credit and lump sum. People will not be fooled by once-off payments when they know they still cannot afford a house. They will not be fooled while the Government lets the 1% and the multinationals run up hundreds of billions of euro in wealth and profits and they will not be fooled by a giveaway election budget by a Government that has given up on making any real fundamental change in people's lives.

Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent)
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The Parliamentary Budget Office prepared a paper for us, which stated: "It has to be acknowledged that the political cycle provides little incentive to plan for medium or long-term needs." It acknowledged that point, and that each Government is driven by short-term needs. However, notwithstanding that acknowledgement, the continuation of that approach by this Government is particularly shocking, particularly worrying and unacceptable given the challenges we face.

It is 75 years since we made that wonderful declaration that we were a republic, which obviously is a work in progress. We have in the budget, for the first time, a surreal surplus of €25 billion, including €14.1 billion from the Apple case that the Government struggled gallantly not to take. That enables us to make the republic a reality in the real sense of what a republic means. The background to this budget that makes transformative action necessary is our declaration of a climate and biodiversity emergency in May 2019. In previous budget speeches, the Taoiseach, the former Taoiseach and various Ministers told us the world was burning but all of that type of language is gone, which is interesting in itself. We declared the emergency and then we had the Covid pandemic, both absolutely requiring transformative action but there is not a sign of that.

We had the Housing Commission report earlier this year but it was never discussed in the Dáil. The commission stated: "Housing must be a unique national priority, supporting social cohesion and economic development." It went on to say that the problems in housing have arisen due to the:

...failure to successfully treat housing as a critical social and economic priority, evident in a lack of consistency in housing policy. Inconsistency undermines confidence. A consequence of these policy failures is that Ireland has, by comparison with our European partners, one of the highest levels of public expenditure for housing, yet one of the poorest outcomes ... Only a radical reset of housing policy will work..

Did we get that in this budget? Absolutely not. The Government parties have continued to put their heads in the sand by renewing the help-to-buy scheme, which is pushing the price of houses to extraordinarily high levels. There is no increase in targets to the most minimal of requirements that should be considered.

The number of people in homelessness has been normalised. We now have 14,486 people who are homeless. Any sensible government would say that is a policy failure. That total of 14,486 includes 4,316 children. More than 50% of renters need help from the State to rent, while rents continue to rise at 2.5 times the European average. When I mention homelessness of more than 14,000, I am not including the hidden homeless. Surely that is an indictment of our Republic. The Government claims that its housing policies are successful, even though the commission that it set up is clearly telling us that they are not. To tell us that the help-to-buy scheme is going to be extended is an absolute mockery. That we would need to give Government help to consultants and those earning good salaries, including TDs, to enable them to buy a house is totally unacceptable. I repeat the word "mockery".

If we were truly interested in being a republic, or in working towards it, one of the most basic things that we would have introduced in this budget is a cost-of-disability payment. I welcome the various social welfare increases, although I might come back to that because they are not being benchmarked or placed in context but the one thing that would make a difference, a cost-of-disability payment, is completely ignored. The abolition of means-testing for carers did not happen. The means test is still there, even though we went to the trouble of having a referendum to tell carers that we thought they were wonderful for minding people who needed care. The Government said it was there for them, yet it retains the means test. We are awaiting a judgment in a Supreme Court case. A mother was forced to go all the way up through the courts and such is the importance of the case that the Supreme Court took charge of it, as I understand it. We are waiting on that. I worry that it might not be the ideal case to test what is being tested. Nevertheless, it is worth reading the judgments to date from previous court hearings and what was said about the burden that mother has to bear.

Let me briefly refer to direct provision. I heard comments earlier today on direct provision but the Government's policy on it, as distinct from its policy on people from Ukraine, is absolutely wrong. The Government has used a divide-and-conquer mechanism whereby some people coming to our country are good and others are not. We decided a long time ago that direct provision was not acceptable. When I say "we", I am referring to the Day report in 2020 and the White Paper on Ending Direct Provision from the Government in 2021, which proposed going down the road of building not-for-profit centres. That has not happened. Not alone has it not happened but we have the Taoiseach of the country telling us that direct provision applicants are causing the homelessness problem or are part of it. It is shocking, divisive politics that is absolutely unacceptable. I am sure the Minister of State does not agree with that and I would love to hear his voice on it. As we talk about that, 6,500 individuals are still in direct provision, although they have refugee status and they cannot get out. Yesterday, I was in contact with the Minister for children again about a person who is living in a car, having been thrown out of direct provision in Galway to make room for other people. That is how cracked the policy is at the moment. That person is working full time, doing 12-hour shifts and is living in a car. The answer from the Minister in a letter to this person was to go to Dublin and get emergency accommodation. That would mean leaving their job, and then we castigate them for not wanting to work.

With regard to indigenous industries, I despair with this budget. The Government has not even begun to consider the importance of indigenous industries, even though it has been warned by every organisation that deals with fiscal rectitude that we are overly reliant on a small coterie of foreign direct investors and we need to broaden our tax base, incentivise indigenous industries and look after our SMEs. None of that is happening at all. I think of seaweed, wool and of the fishermen in the coastal areas that have not been mentioned who are still waiting on a policy relating to sustainability for sprat and stopping the big boats from going in there.

I will finish on infrastructure. I welcome that the budget mentions infrastructure but there is no plan or pathway. I come from a city where the sewage treatment infrastructure is collapsing. We have a plant that is functioning very well but the issue is with the collection and the pipes. One of them is in imminent danger of collapse and I referred to all of that last week. We cannot have balanced regional development or even balanced development within a city and county without the sewage treatment plan in Carraroe. None of that is happening. If the Government is finally taking a step, I welcome that.

Finally, in the two speeches given today there was not one single mention of the homeless. The 144,486 homeless people were not mentioned. We had a Minister talking about hope and how important it is to give hope. The best way to give hope is to give shelter. A home is a basic human right. That is the best way to give hope, or at least to give a pathway to that, knowing that Government realises its policy is wrong and needs to be changed. It is not hope that I am taking out of today but hopelessness.

Marian Harkin (Sligo-Leitrim, Independent)
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There was a lot of money available to the Government so there are positive aspects to this budget and measures I agree with, including the Future Ireland Fund and the Infrastructure, Climate and Nature Fund. I actually voted for them in the previous budget and am glad to see they are being continued and that the Government is investing more in Irish Water and in the Land Development Agency. There are a few decent proposals on agriculture, including the provision whereby non-farmers who buy land will need to hold on to it for a minimum of six years and actively farm it before they can get a tax-free exemption from passing it on. There is a tax on e-cigarettes and a higher rate of stamp duty on the bulk acquisition of houses, which we tried to bring in earlier this year but the Government voted against us.

8 o’clock

All of those are positive aspects to this budget.

The Government has kept the 9% VAT rate on electricity and on the installation of heat pumps but this is a massive sum. When a government has that kind of money available to it, we expect to see real impact, real change. We expect, as many people have said here today, to see a transformative budget. While there are, as I said, a number of politically very attractive decisions here, the Taoiseach said he would not apologise for any of them. Of course, why would he? They are vote getters. However, we need to look beyond the surface. We need to look at the substantive issues in this budget and how this money is being spent. It is not that Ministers puts their hand in their back pocket and says, "Here's my money. I'm giving it to you." This is the taxpayers' money. It is not just about spending money; it is about how it is spent and where it is spent. It is about the vision, the transformation and value for money.

I will give just one example of why I think the Minister is not so much dealing with the bread-and-butter issues but more with the jam on the top of the bread. We have the free schoolbooks scheme and free school meals, which, of course, we need. Parents are delighted to see them, and parents are voters. However, let us look at the education system, particularly the primary school system. Primary schools are on their knees. Capitation grants are totally inadequate. We have the highest pupil-teacher ratio in Europe and our teachers are emigrating. Those are the substantive issues. Of course, we need free schoolbooks and free school meals. No one could suggest that this deals with the substantive issues in education; this simply does not. That is my concern about certain parts of this budget. It underpins much of the thinking here. Of course, this is an election budget; let us not pretend it is anything else.

We have decreased the cost of childcare for parents, which is hugely important because people need to be able to afford childcare. However, people also need to be able to access childcare. In my county of Sligo, six childcare providers have closed their doors this year. It was actually seven, but one has gone to a community service. They are closing because they simply cannot remain open and make a profit. The system that is in place is attractive and parents are very happy to see the costs are coming down, though not by enough but they are coming down. We cannot ignore the issue of accessibility so that childcare is available for parents. Some of these shortsighted measures do not deal with the totality of the issue that I have real concern about.

The one-off payments are again a symptom of that. In fact, people welcome all of them because they represent money in their back pocket. However, if we really want to deal with poverty, whether it is child poverty or family poverty, we know that it is long-term social welfare increases that matter. There are a few of them in the budget. For example, I was glad to see that carer's allowance will be a qualifying payment for fuel allowance, which is really important, and that the qualifying age for fuel allowance has gone from 70 to 66 depending on the person's means. It is not as if the Government has none of this but it does not have enough. It has not made a substantive or transformative change in this budget.

Somehow agriculture always seems to be a distant cousin when it comes to the budget - more of the same with a few extra euro thrown in here and there. One of the issues that really concerns me is that there is nothing about the efficiency of schemes, how they are delivered, how they are paid and the increasing red tape and bureaucracy. There will be extra money for ACRES, for example, but we need to consider how badly that scheme has been managed and the fact that farmers have lost faith in it. It is not just about money sometimes; it is also about how the schemes operate.

The Minister, Deputy Donohoe, talked about four areas. He said our investment has resulted in many children benefiting from free schoolbooks and free school meals, etc. While I accept that, nobody on this side of the House looked at the perilous state of our education system. He talked about a significant increase in health expenditure. While I accept that, the numbers on trolleys have increased every year since this Government took office. My own hospital, Sligo University Hospital, is always in the top three, including today. It is just one behind Galway with 51 people waiting on trolleys. He talked about the number of new homes and he actually said that 116,000 new homes have been delivered since 2020. If we divide that by 4.5, because we have had this Government for four and a half years, that comes to 25,777 houses per year. We need twice that, as the Minister of State and I both know. That is, therefore, not an achievement. He talked about a record number of people in employment, which is true, but our young people are emigrating in droves because they cannot get housing. We need to manage both of those issues.

I was hugely disappointed that the Minister did not reinstate the 9% VAT rate for hospitality businesses in the food sector. It will have a significant negative impact, especially in rural areas. There will be job losses and indigenous businesses will close. That is as sure as night follows day. The budget has placed increased costs on business. While we have increased the minimum wage, I am always bemused that the Government says, "We increased the minimum wage." It is actually employers who pay the increased minimum wage. Governments need to support them to do that, especially small businesses.

There is much more in this budget. I will have an opportunity to speak about some of it tomorrow. I agree with Deputy Connolly; I was really disappointed to see that no cost-of-disability payment was included in this budget. The Minister spoke about increasing numbers in the Defence Forces and improving their uniforms. He needs to look at improving their terms and conditions as well.

There were only two mentions of balanced regional development in the whole budget - regional airports and urban regeneration. Given that the European Commission has ranked infrastructure in the northern and western region as 218 out of 234 European regions, those two items will not even begin to close that gap.