Labour’s Ged Nash reacts to Budget 2025

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Ceann Comhairle, the Ireland of 2024 is a country of winners and losers.

A country of contrasts. Of contradictions. A paradox of plenty.

• Record corporation tax receipts but record numbers of our citizens without a home
• The highest number of people ever at work, yet one in five workers subsist on pay below a Living Wage
• Surpluses the envy of Europe with public services and creaking infrastructure that should shame us
• An apparent economic miracle papering over the cracks of the daily, now routine indignities of crushing child poverty.

100 years ago this year, the Boundary Commission was set up. It formally divided our island.

A century on, the policies of Fine Gael and Fianna Fail have succeeded in dividing the people of this State. Socially and economically.

It need not have been this way. These were the choices you have made.

A few short years ago, our country was bust. Our options were limited.

Now, for the first time in our history, and after a decade of uninterrupted growth, money isn’t the problem. It’s a lack of imagination and vision that’s holding our country and its people back.

Labour is different. We are ambitious for Ireland. Our country is at a crossroads.

This country needs a change of direction. You should call an election now.

Never before was Labour, the progressive centre-left, more needed in government, to shape a better, fairer future. To help get the basics of a rich country, right.

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I passed a Takeaway food van on the way in here this morning. The name on it was “It’s All Gravy.” These days that’s given to mean, ‘it’s all good’. It’s not all good. Far from it. But the literal phrase is apt for this so-called ‘giveaway’ Budget Day.

A deep dinner plate drowned in tasty once-off measures to hide the fact that there’s very little real meat on offer to sustain anyone.

The tragedy of this government is this. You have contrived to waste a boom.

Strangled by your own crippling conservatism, this government’s ideology has made this rich country feel so poor.

And all presided over by ‘Schroedinger’s Taoiseach’.

The man who manages to be both in government and opposition at the same time.

It used to be the case that no thought was spared for Tik Tok.

Now, no thought from the Taoiseach, no matter how trivial, goes unsent to grateful hacks, and diligently reported.

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And the conduct of this Budget process is a case in point.

Frankly I was fully expecting to see a copy of the Minister’s speeches in my pigeon hole when I picked up my post this morning.

The utter disrespect shown to the members of this House and indeed your own backbenchers with the farcical feeding-frenzy of leaks going back to late Spring is breathtaking.

It is self-serving. It is arrogant. It does politics a disservice. It undermines good government. And it militates against the kind of big thinking our country needs.

A political culture, with some exceptions, dominated by ego. Getting your name in the paper, rather than getting things done.

It’s about time we grew up. Other mature European countries do their budgets professionally. They actively involve, not by-pass parliament. Things need to change.

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The business of governing in the Ireland of 2024 is an accountability-free zone.

So much cash on the hip, that Ministers feel they can avoid and evade responsibility for indefensible cost over runs on key public projects like our long-awaited Childrens’ Hospital.

Always on hand to take credit, rarely around to accept responsibility.

We live in peculiar political times. But real accountability is on the way. We need an election now.

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And this summer’s non-stop briefings were revealing. An insight into the narrow ideological mindset of parties that were once rivals, and who are now indistinguishable from one another.

• You could paper the walls of Leinster House ten times over with pearl-clutching op-eds from FG on the injustices of inheritance tax thresholds. I was on the verge of calling Amnesty International to see if they could help Minister Richmond with a postcard campaign. Where was the anger over the injustice of nearly 15,000 citizens in emergency accommodation?
• 20% of kids have to go without a new winter coat this year, yet more was written about the tax implications for a tiny number of families who stand to inherit businesses, than how a Party that promised to fix child poverty might consign that scandal to history.
• Well placed nods from Minister Burke, the only Enterprise Minister to date who has the infamy of having rejected a Low Pay Commission recommendation to help the lowest paid. A shameful indictment of FG. This is your “We have had enough of experts” moment.

Virtue signalling at its worst from a conservative government that has chosen sides and is damn proud of it.

And this is a government that has chosen sides. And it is proud of it.

Boxing off FG and FF voters, but 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
• Truly rewarded work by using our wealth not merely to cut taxes, but the cost of childcare, health care and education, delivering of a real social wage.
• Heralded the radical step-change demanded to build the homes we need?
• Delivered the massive investment we need to make homes warm, invest in renewables, and cut emissions
• Finally fix the tattered social contract, the idea that if you work hard and keep your nose clean you’ll get on in life.

This Budget, the last of this government’s five, has delivered a resounding ‘no’ on all fronts.

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Fiscal position

Today could have marked a turning point. The day when Ireland started a journey of real transformation. The fiscal position is stunning, but your plans aren’t.

This country is swimming in cash. But this is a Budget for the status quo. Straight out of the FG and FF school of ‘Sure, it’ll 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 flattering.

Today is an extraordinarily missed opportunity.

€10bn in new spending. €6bn to the two wealth funds. And to top it all off over €14bn in an unexpected windfall to spend on future proofing our country and yet, with this Budget, you’ve managed to make all this look like a problem, not an opportunity. This is a hell of a trick to pull off. A Budget with no central theme, nothing adds up, no compelling narrative. No plan or burning desire to put our wealth to good, responsible use, for a change.

The eye-watering Corporation Tax gains have taken you by surprise. Rabbits caught in the headlights

The reality is, the seeds of much of this was sown many years ago, helped by Labour. This bonanza fell into your laps.

And the truth is this. This government’s record for the responsible management of the people’s money is wholly unwarranted.

I say this for three reasons.

Albeit completely made-up to pretend you could let Fianna Fail come back into the house without them burning it down, you keep breaking your own 5% spending rule. It’s at a heady 9% for 2025.

Last year, you brought in a health budget that was knowingly fraudulent. Only in Ireland would a Health Minister who did this, avoid the chop.

And the ‘fiscal gimmickry’ goes on unabated. Another €4.5bn hidden away for ‘contigencies’ that you pretend take you by surprise every year.

Housing

Hosing is the biggest workers’ rights and economic issue we face.

Yet, we’re seeing the same old tired policies that have driven prices and rents higher and higher, and resulted in 4,419 children without a home in August.

This Government lacks the ambition and the willpower to build enough homes.

But it certainly doesn’t lack the financial firepower.

The lack of imagination to transform the housing system is galling.

When Plan A fails, resort to Plan A.

As the Housing Commission report said – “only a radical strategic reset of housing policy will work”.

So, what is the solution for the next few years?

To extend the Help to Buy scheme? The Minister himself wanted to increase the limit over half a million, supercharging expensive homes, rather than address 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’s been delayed and delayed by ideology, not evidence.

Why are small industrial holdings and businesses being exempted?

Will there be a map of the sites that are being exempted? What are the criteria that will apply?

If land is serviced and zoned for homes it must be built on, though exemption can be made for active farm land. If you don’t want your land for housing, get it de-zoned. Stop hedging your bets.

I don’t need to remind the Minister of the Kenny Report but I will remind them that Labour brought forward a Bill to legislate for it in 2021.

We now have the financial firepower to buy up development sites across the country. These sites.

Let’s legislate for the Kenny Report and resource the LDA to step in and buy the sites we need across the country.

Then we can change the model of development once and for all in this country and build homes in a planned and orderly way, when and where they are needed.

We know that private housing supply is being drip fed into the system at just enough of a rate to keep it ticking over but nowhere near enough to imperil prices or damage profit margins.

For too many in the sector it seen as an asset to buy and sell, not somewhere to live and raise a family.

The market is doing exactly what your ideology has set it up to do – create more and more wealth for the asset holders, while renters and those trying to simply have a home of their own get screwed over. Again, you have made choices.

And when you look at the Government plans for building social and affordable housing it raises 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 to do more and to change people’s lives. Give security. Once and for all.

We can build more cost rental and more truly affordable homes.

But the government is limiting the amount of capital it allocated.

The plans for next year are what were proposed back in 2021.

Even then it wasn’t enough.

That’s why Labour has outlined costed plans to bring that up to 12,000 social, and 10,000 affordable homes a year.

It’s why we committed half of the Apple windfall to transform the LDA into a State Construction Company to give the State real teeth in the housing market, and build the water infrastructure we need.

The latest wheeze on vacancy is new grants to bring back vacant spaces over shops into use. We’ve been hearing about this for a decade now. It’s time to go back to the drawing board.

Resource councils with the money and the staff and they can and will take over vacant and derelict properties, and return them to us. Relying on another new scheme to add to the dozens already dreamed up won’t change much.

On homelessness we know that evictions, not immigration is driving the record levels of family homelessness.

You won’t act to restrict the excuses for eviction but we know that the tenant in situ scheme really works and allows families to stay in their homes.

Across the country Labour reps are hearing about people being denied a chance to live securely under the tenant in situ, or cost rental tenant in situ scheme.

There’s clearly not enough funding dedicated to it. It’s why Labour proposed to increase it by 20% to 1,800 homes next year.

And too much of homelessness funding is responding to crisis when its already too late. We need to invest in prevention.

For renters you’ve given a meagre €250 extra on the rent credit. It’s a help but it could have been a lot more when average rents are well above that. We said €1,500.

5% extra on stamp duty isn’t going to stop bulk buying when you know it’s been increasing and stripping homes from the market. Why not make it truly punitive – who are you seeking to protect, and why not cover apartments too?

Tax

You have so much cash sloshing around, that you just don’t know what to do with it.

I know – tax cuts!  The perennial FG answer to a question nobody is asking.

Can’t get your child an Assessment of Needs? Here’s a fiver instead.

Can’t get affordable childcare? Take this fiver, it’ll be grand.

Performative tax cuts when we need performing public services.

Minister, look at the polling. The people favour public investment in housing, care, climate, education, public transport over the few euro of their own money you’re planning on giving them back.

Not even the ICTU – the actual representatives of working people, want tax cuts. It’s a decent social wage worthy of a wealthy Republic they and we favour.

We now have a race to the bottom between the government parties and SF on tax, not to mention on immigration. This never ends well. Who dares to speak of 2007?

I see SF has a new policy to give all carers the carers allowance. It was dreamed up over night to take the bare look off a sub-par conference speech. It’s Labour policy and this wasn’t in SF’s Alternative Budget launched last Thursday.

And, as their embattled leader is prone to say – “here’s the thing.” Well, here IS the thing. The USC cut SF proposes costs €2bn. That’s a full three years of no-questions-asked non-means tested carers allowance payments for some of the best and most isolated and under-appreciated people in our country.

As each day passes, SF’s credibility as a self-described left-wing party becomes more discredited.

For a left-wing party they are quite something. They have rarely met a tax they believe is fair, or they didn’t want to get rid of. USC. Property Taxes. Taxes on the burning of the carbon that’s killing the planet. The list goes on.

The €500m FF USC cut of 1% could pay for a full year of targeted child benefit payments to make child poverty history. But no, fancy a tax cut instead?

Labour has no issue with rises in workers’ pay going untouched by income tax. That’s as it should be. We would allocate €1bn in a neutral way to do just that this year.

But the ever-narrowing of our vulnerable tax base is wrong. The same people who warn us about the concentration risks of our business tax system are the very ones who are making 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.

Your obsession with cutting the thresholds for inheritance tax is a case in point.

You will spend €88m of the money that belongs to working people on giving an even more generous tax break to not just children, but the grandchildren too, of those who stand to inherit very valuable properties – and all in the middle of a housing crisis. Alan Shatter is living in your head!

That’s the cost of rolling out hot meals to every single school in Ireland over the next five years. That’s your trade off. This is where this government’s priorities are. You have made a choice.

And I do understand your argument, even if I disagree with it, but you are not consistent. House prices have gone up then so must the threshold. This is your logic.

Wages have gone up too, so why does this government keep the cap on statutory redundancy for a worker who will lose their job at €600 per week, and not move it to the €1,000 average it’s at now. This has not been reviewed in 20 years. The inconsistency is appalling. Again, you have chosen a side and you’re telling the 3% of households who will ever stand to benefit, all about it.

I note the return too of what was meant to be a ‘temporary’ Mortgage Interest Relief measure. Michael McGrath was warned not to do it. It is untargeted and is a subsidy paid by those who have no home to those who have.

We were told it would benefit 150,000 mortgage holders. Only 25,000 have applied. €125m was allocated by government with only €17.2million drawn down. But you’ll go again with a tax break few are actively seeking, and against the expert advice. And the same will go for relief for landlords. A tax break nobody asked for, but they got anyway. You could not make this up.

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 it’s application to more firms, greater stamp duty on share buybacks and so on 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 & Welfare, I’d be protesting outside here today.

Their calls for a rebalancing of the tax take, a focus on taxing wealth and harmful behaviours has again fallen on deaf ears.

FG and FF’s rejection of their timely 2022 report – of which almost all of the measures proposed have been sneered at or roundly ignored – is shameful.

Cost of living – ‘once-off’ measures

‘Once-off measures.’ The most abused term in recent Irish political history. Inflation is slowing but the price of everything is high. 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 you didn’t spend what the dogs on the street knew was needed last October to bring weekly social welfare rates and secondary benefits up to scratch, means you’re back with the temporary bazooka of cash again.

You needed to increase all core weekly social welfare rates by €25 a week last year. You did €12.

On Saturday you had a billion and a half to lash out and now it’s €2bn.

On Sunday, you decided you’re giving us all back more of our own money and all because you just haven’t a clue how to spend it. We live in extraordinary times.

This explains your eleventh-hour conversion to Labour’s idea in our Alternative Budget, of an extra Child Benefit double-payment. That just wasn’t on the agenda until the cash started burning a hole in your pocket.

Minister, it is fiscally wrong to keep going with once-off measures. The scattergun measures have in fact put a percentage point on to inflation, adding an extra €1,000 a year of costs to households. It is those who can least afford to shoulder the cost of government generated higher prices who will pay that price.

Moreover, it is socially irresponsible. Why?

What we have in Ireland is a low incomes problem, described by commentators as a cost of living crisis.

This is exacerbated by a failure of regulation. Hugh energy prices. Price gouging in supermarkets. The list goes on and government has to take this on. FG especially has refused to. No legislation as promised last year in response to Labour’s campaign for price transparency for the weekly shop.

We cannot keep lashing untargeted wads of cash at the problem, but what we can do is this.

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.

WELFARE AND WORK

And fix social protection we must.

Society has accepted there should be minimum essential standard of living for all citizens.

This conservative government hasn’t.

The nature of the internal coalition social welfare debate and pre-budget leaks were troubling.

The arguments were described as ‘ideological’, by the Sunday Independent. I hope they were. They should be.

The fake hard men and women in FG were saying pensioners and carers should get more of an increase than the unemployed. A warped version of FG ideology. The deserving poor versus workshy. There’s your line for the news. Dangerous and unbecoming stuff. Trumped in the end by a bit of decency from FF and the GP.

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, you give €12/€15?

There was a time when the old FF wouldn’t stand for this. They’ve drank the FG Kool Aid on social welfare.

It’s as bad a case of Stockholm Syndrome as we have ever seen. I’m worried for Willie O’Dea and the gang. Someone should check in on him.

Remember, this is a government that will face the electorate in a few weeks having not hiked the base rate of fuel allowance since 2021 or increased the Living Alone allowance in two years. All the cash splattered around doesn’t hide the fact that FG hasn’t increased Child Benefit at all since it took office with the support of FF and independents in 2016.

Where is the €25 cost of disability payment Labour and others have argued for? This needs to be explained by a Minister who has limitless resources at her hand.

There is now no difference worth talking about between Fianna Fail and Fine Gael. Just go and merge.

When FG says their 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 hasn’t, and it won’t.

Child poverty

I must say my heart leaped when Leo Varadkar on assuming the Office of Taoiseach again said he would work day and night to tackle the scourge of child poverty.

The rhetoric led us to hope for a children’s budget to end child poverty. Last year’s budget wasn’t it, and neither is this.

Everyone knows you can’t break a promise to a child.

But Fine Gael did. They have broken an earnest promise to the 30,000 kids who have been added to the enforced deprivation statistics since Leo Varadkar made those hollow promises in December 2022.

Every child inside that cage that’s so hard to break free from need not become an adult shaped by the long tail and lasting effects and the shame and stigma and the physical and psychological long tail of growing up with nothing. This can change. Choices, Minister.

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, and on our way to finally deciding to end the misery of absolutely preventable child poverty by fessing up and saying, yes, let’s spend €700m a year on that second tier of child benefit.

We welcome some of the moves made today. They should have been done last year.

Let’s not just rebrand the QCP. Make it matter.

Let’s agree that all children need every chance in life. Let’s invest in DEIS plus. Let’s invest in genuinely free education. Let’s pass Labour’s seven-year old Bill to end family homelessness.

Ending childing poverty is within our grasp. It must be a priority for the next government and be an election issue. It is by no means a priority in this Budget. Let’s fight an election on ending child poverty – not on ending the USC.

Childcare

And when we’re 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 the Budget. I can’t help thinking 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 the lack of big thinking in politics at the moment. This is it. From Ivana Bacik. The Niamh Breathnach or Donagh O’Malley moment we have been waiting for.

Let’s end to the strange Irish exceptionalism that says we can’t 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 €53m. Prioritising areas with a shortage of spaces first, while capping existing costs for parents at €50 a day.

There is no sign of this kind of transformational thinking from this government, and no sign either in this Budget of extra meaningful help to bring down costs for parents.

Every day I am meeting parents who, especially with the disastrous flexible working from home code of practice that Labour always said was doomed to fail workers, are thinking of giving up work or cutting their hours because of a lack of availability of childcare, an affordability issue, or in some cases, both.

We are not serious about an equal start for all children and we are not serious about taking our economy to the next level if we are not serious about transforming our early years education system into the kind of system that is just taken as read in comparable European countries.

The childcare package presented today is piecemeal, fragmented and underwhelming for parents, staff and providers alike. Our whole approach must change.

Use of the NTF

Just like on childcare, Ireland has enormous skills and competitiveness challenges. Especially in our SME sector. We rely too much on a small handful of big FDI firms for our business tax haul, a huge portion of our income tax base, and good jobs.

And if we are to sustain our economic success and be competitive, we must invest in future skills, lifelong learning, in-work training and apprenticeships.

Our PRSI levy based National Training Fund is heading for a surplus of €2bn.

I was shocked that today you have confirmed that the grand plan we have all been waiting for is nothing more than the raiding of the Fund to bridge the gap that this government has exacerbated in third-level funding.

The current Taoiseach had one job to do when he was Higher Education chief. Figure out how to fund our colleges. He ducked that one. Labour agrees the NTF has a role in funding third-level, but not an outsized one.

To help address Ireland’s skills and competitiveness gap Labour is clear that we need the NTF to fund a transformational free part-time third level and skills vouchers for those at work – to use how and when they wish.

APPLE & AIB MONEY

The parties of the status quo are incapable of fixing the problems we have.

The evidence is all around us.

On housing. A lack of progress on offshore wind. Anaemic retrofitting programmes. Creaking water services. An energy grid not able to meet our current or future demands.

The PBO report from last week is shocking. This year, amid all the largesse, this government will invest less in infrastructure than we did in 2008. This is damning. Moreover, at no point between now and 2030 will those spending plans come close to that 2008 figure. 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, mandate and authority to do the truly big things we need to see happen, the things that can truly transform Ireland.

We note the government’s references to the Apple Tax money and the cash from the sale of AIB shares.

The track record shows this government cannot be trusted with the big things.

That’s why it must be left up to the next government – a government with a mandate – to use our new found wealth to transform Ireland.

Labour will make our case to be part of the next government, a government that, for once in our history, will have the capacity to truly transform Ireland.

And that is a massive responsibility. There is a responsibility too on all serious parties of the centre-left to co-operate and not to waste this historic opportunity to shape a more social democratic and sustainable future.

Labour is serious about government. We are serious about Ireland. We are serious about what needs to be done and honest about how we pay for it.

We have made it clear how we would plan to deploy the Apple Tax money. We have the courage of our convictions, and the experience, to do so.

• €7bn on housing to seed a State Housing Construction through the existing LDA, with a billion of that to support the water network to service land
• €2.5bn to make major, transformative transport projects such as Metro, LUAS, Bus Connects and Dart Plus happen
• One billion so the State can invest to make Offshore Wind generation happen, cutting, emissions, keeping homes warm, slashing energy prices and helping create an industry and new sustainable jobs and businesses. Fund a street-by-street retrofitting revolution that will be transformational.
• And deploy one billion to create a Slaintecare Transition Fund, half of which Labour would use to rollout 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.