The Government’s pre-election budget bonanza is less about putting money back in people’s pockets, and more about funding the myriad private services that the State has become reliant on.
Despite having a €23.7bn surplus, we have failed to provide what should be basic universal supports and services, from housing to healthcare and childcare.
“Despite the budget being announced today, we still feel poor as a country in so many ways,” Sinn Féin’s Pearse Doherty told the Dáil.
With pre-Christmas goodie bags for everyone in the audience, Budget 2025 provides certainty around one thing: this coalition’s priority is on short-term wins that will appeal to voters ahead of an election, which now has to be called before the end of the year.
Members of the Government, including very senior ministers, were pumped up with positivity as they emerged from the Dáil chamber armed with spending commitments and tax cuts that can now be added to constituency leaflets.
But the vision becomes blurred when it comes to outlining a clear pathway towards finally becoming a country that protects the vulnerable and the sick. A country where finding a GP isn’t a challenge; where children with special needs are given a school place; where needing a hip operation doesn’t mean a 12-month waiting list; where the risk of homelessness isn’t a constant threat over the heads of thousands of families.
In the coming weeks, people will be inundated with double payments and once-off bonus supports, but in many cases the extra bit of cash will be funneled into paying for private services that have filled the gap left by inadequate, oversubscribed and in some cases non-existent State provision.
“Privatisation by stealth,” was how Labour’s Ged Nash described the coalition’s approach, which will dole out €2bn in cost-of-living measures — all before the end of the year.
“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,” Mr Nash told the Dáil after Paschal Donohoe and Jack Chambers outlined the details of Budget 2025.
Free money is always welcome.
But parents receiving not one but two double child benefit payments before Christmas, will still struggle to find childcare places or afterschool spaces as any form of State-provided service remains an aspiration rather than a commitment.
The extension of free school meals and the free book scheme will also be a financial relief to many families, but a persistent underfunding of the school system means they will continue to pay ‘voluntary’ contributions so schools can provide art and craft supplies, fix leaky roofs or even turn on the lights.
For parents of children with disabilities, the €20 increase in the domiciliary care allowance will not shorten the time those children will have to wait for an assessment of needs and will not cut waiting lists to receive the therapies they need.
For parents like Ciara Reilly, who is writing in today’s Irish Examiner, the little bit of extra cash will go towards private occupational therapy for her daughter Doireann, which costs €95 each week.
Carers are happy to be acknowledged through a number of increases in supports, but they will still struggle to find respite when they need to take a break or when they are simple burned out.
For older people, who will get a double pension payment later this month, the promise of statutory home care is still very much an unfilled commitment.
While €250 energy credit may provide a financial boost before Christmas, but as Social Justice Ireland pointed out, it won’t stop many thousands of inadequately insulated homes growing even colder and damper than they were last winter.
While welcoming a tax credit for renters, Threshold said longer term thinking and measures to increase access to affordable housing — whether to rent or buy — are what are truly needed to address the affordability crisis in our housing system.
In the Dáil, Social Democrats TD Róisín Shortall asked what will happen in January when the bonus payments dry up?
“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’.”
But while the opposition searched for any long-term vision — there was a vague commitment to invest the €14bn of Apple taxes in water, electricity, housing and infrastructure — those on the Government benches came away very happy with what was being described as a “very good budget”.
Various election scenarios were being discussed and debated in the Leinster House halls, all dates proposed are now before November, which would come right in the midst of the once-off and double payment bonanza.
Taoiseach Simon Harris would be wise to heed a growing clamber to call an election in the coming weeks before the “giveaway on steroids”, as Ms Shortall put it, quickly drains out of bank accounts.
