Budget a squandered opportunity to deal with housing crisis, Sinn Fein says

The budget was a “squandered opportunity” to tackle Ireland’s housing crisis and deal with inequality, Sinn Fein has said.

The party’s finance spokesman Pearse Doherty also attacked the Government for doing “next to nothing” for the health service and said measures to deal with rising energy costs were “too little, too late”.

Delivering his budget response in the Dail, Mr Doherty said the number one priority facing the government should have been housing.

He said: “Young people left without hope, children growing up in emergency accommodation, businesses who can’t get workers, schools which can’t get teachers, gardai, nurses, members of our defence forces leaving their profession because they can’t find somewhere to live.

“This should have been a budget to resolve the housing crisis, but today Minister McGrath and Minister Donohoe have failed in that regard.

“Fine Gael and Fianna Fail have caused the housing crisis and today’s budget is further confirmation that they are not the ones to fix it.”

The senior Sinn Fein TD said it should have been a budget for renters, but added that “instead we got a budget for landlords”.

He continued: “A Sinn Fein government would have introduced a budget that would have got to grips with the housing crisis and built the homes that our people so desperately need.

“The housing crisis is the Government’s greatest failure and ending the housing crisis is Sinn Fein’s number one priority, delivering the biggest public housing programme in the history of the state is Sinn Fein’s number one priority.

“It needed to be the number one priority of this budget, but under this Government entire generations have been locked out of home ownership, more than two-thirds of our young people are forced to live with their parents and more of them are reaching the conclusion that their future is not here, but elsewhere.”

Mr Doherty said housing targets in the budget were too low and said tax measures would benefit landlords more than tenants.

He said: “Let’s call it for what it is – you’ve decided to put taxpayers’ money into the pockets of landlords and you couldn’t make this up, you simply couldn’t make this up,” he said.

“In this budget, this Government has provided nearly twice as much for landlords as it has to struggling renters.”

Turning to health, Mr Doherty said: “There is very little in this budget that will give any comfort to patients or parents who are struggling to get access to basic health and basic care services.

“No urgency, no vision, no compassion, and that’s the reality. You’ve just decided to forget about health.

“You fail time and time again to invest in the workforce and to plan for the future.”

He added: “The Government have decided very clearly that they’re throwing in the towel on health, that they don’t have any vision, that they have nothing to offer any more, they have nothing to offer in terms of improving the conditions faced by healthcare workers or indeed the patients – or indeed they have no interest.”

Mr Doherty said measures announced by the Government to deal with energy prices were “too little, too late” and attacked planned increases in carbon taxes.

He said: “What the Government fails to understand is that in many parts of Ireland driving a car is not a luxury, driving a car is a necessity: it is how you get your kids to school, it is how you travel to work, it is how you make your way to the hospital appointment.

“Accessible public transport doesn’t exist in many of these communities.

“Yet the Government are hell-bent to increase the price of petrol and diesel through further increases in carbon taxes.”

He said: “With surpluses worth billions of euro in the years ahead, we have a unique opportunity to tackle the housing crisis and the infrastructure deficit that harm living standards and undermine our economy, and this budget was a squandered opportunity in that regard.

“This budget needed to make life more affordable for our people, it needed to reduce the cost-of-living, it needed to accelerate the delivering of affordable homes, to tackle overcrowding and unacceptable waiting lists in our health service, to use this opportunity to deliver lasting change and better living standards for our people.

“In the time to come, this budget will be remembered as one which wasted that opportunity.”