Ged Nash TD, Labour finance spokesperson, responds to Budget 2027

Ged Nash TD, Labour finance spokesperson, responds to Budget 2027 - The Labour Party

_{** Check against delivery **}

_{So, there you have it. The first Budget of two from Soundbite Simon and Jack GPT.} 

_{We expected little, and you haven’t disappointed.}  

_{A tenner on the pension, but not even enough to keep up with inflation;}

_{Two grand on the rent a room relief that will cost students the same in rent increases.}

_{A help to buy top up to drive house prices higher for developers;}

_{And as electricity prices soar and hundreds of thousands are in arrears, you can spend a hundred million a month to cut the price of diesel but nothing to keep the storage heater going.} 

_{Because at the heart of this Budget is a lack of honesty about the challenges we face, and what the solutions are.} 

_{Bread and circuses to distract from the lack of action to permanently cut the cost of living and address the crisis in energy prices, incomes and child poverty.} 

_—-

_{The Tánaiste told us it was to be a “workers’ budget.”} 

_{Some neck, after leaving them out last year.} 

_{“People who get up early in the morning” was brought off the bench for the pre-match warm up.}

_{But those waking up this evening for the night shift will be sorely disappointed.} 

_{Because this is a budget for those who can afford a bloody good lie-in.} 

_{A budget for those who already have a few bob in the bank, who can afford to save, and where their money is burning a hole in their pockets.} 

_{A budget that’s done the business for the lucky few who inherit a bit of cash.}

_***********

_{It is time this government were reminded who the fabled people who get up early in morning really are.} 

• _{The Mam and Dad who pay through the nose for childcare they’ll still be barely able to afford in 11 months time when todays announcement kicks in.}
• _{The nurse and healthcare assistant who you have left without a pay deal.} 
• _{The unpaid carer up all night with their elderly mother walking the floors who still won’t qualify for the carers’ allowance}

_{Time and again I have reminded this House that the Ireland of 2026 is a rich country that is poor in so many ways.}

_{We are a country that’s full of contradictions.}

_{Unprecedented numbers of people at work, alongside growing child poverty and deprivation.}

_{Climbing inequality set against overflowing tax revenues.} 

_{Embarrassing public service gaps after a decade plus long boom, and a Minister happy to lay the blame for his infrastructure and housing failures, on Judicial Reviews.} 

_{The highest electricity prices in Europe, but we’re in no real rush to retrofit.} 

_{It used to be that money was our problem. But in 2026, it’s ideas, vision.}

_{This Budget could have fixed health, housing, education and transport.} 

_{A budget focused on energy, incomes and child poverty.}

_{To deliver a future we can all afford as Labour has laid out.} 

_{Instead, we have budgets by lobbyists, for lobbyists. Last year it was hospitality, this year it’s been investors and contractors.} 

_{The corporate tax windfall has made FG and FF lazy and lacking in vision.} 

_{They are clutching at last minute distractions like culture cards and stamp duty cuts to take the bare look off the lack of energy credits, real improvements in public services, and fare hikes.}

_{DISHONEST BUDGETING}

_{A dishonest budget that sees pensioners fall further behind.} 

_{Tax adjustments for working people dishonestly promoted as tax cuts when it barely keeps pace with wage growth.} 

_{Cost of disability payments that see the return of our old pals the lump-sum payments, paid for from the risky surplus stash you gamble will be around forever.}

_{As long as cash keeps rolling in until the next election, you figure you’ll be grand.} 

_{Fianna Fáil’s traditional fiscal recklessness and populism has now infected Fine Gael.} 

_{We have a Minister for Finance who can’t seem to walk by a microphone without telling them his latest budget plans.} 

_{Collective cabinet confidentiality has been replaced by collective cabinet incontinence.} 

_{With a troubling inability to see the big picture, it seems the only pictures that really matter to this mob of Ministers are the big ones of them, on the front page of tomorrow’s papers.} 

_{The Budget is an object lesson on how Ireland works in 2026.} 

• _{If you own a chain of chicken joints in Ireland, you’ll have the ear of Ministers.}
• _{If you have a few tractors on the road and can bring this Republic to a standstill, the same.}

_{For PAYE workers, for workers on low pay, for carers, for children in poverty, it’s a very different story.} 

_{The Tanaiste told me in this Chamber two weeks ago that “help is on the way”.} 

_{Help for whom?}

• _{Not for the 500,000 plus families, and growing, who are already behind with the bills, and who you deny an energy credit to}
• _{Not for the students and families hard pressed to find the money to go back to school, or for the commuters slapped around the face with fare hikes} 
• _{Not for the pensioner whose weekly payment has been swallowed up by the rising cost of absolutely everything, and who will fall further behind next year.}
• _{And not for the 200,000 poorest kids in Ireland whose families are left hanging for another year without the help of a second tier of child benefit.} 

_{BUDGET PROCESS}

_{And when we talk about dishonesty, don’t get me started on FG and FF’s fetish for fictional, fraudulent budgeting.} 

_{Last year, the Minister for Education, who must have been out the day the multiplication and long division was done in school got her numbers so very badly wrong.}

_{She had to get a bailout to the tune of €600million plus to keep the show on the road in 2027 – paid for by levies on her colleagues budgets – in health and across the spectrum. And here’s the mad thing – a deal was done between Education and Public Expenditure. An understanding that they’d be tapped up for a few hundred million this year to fill the hole. And it was delivered, tied up in a bow. No questions asked.} 

_{And here we go again. Another dishonest budget in a long line of works of fiction.} 

_{You are guilty of the kind of creative accounting that would make Man City blush.} 

_{And like the blue half of Manchester, your luck will run out. Relegation to the Opposition bench can’t come quickly enough.} 

_{Ministers deliberately low-balling in their estimates to make the overall figures look good.} 

_{In a serious country, Ministers would be handed P45s for less.} 

_{And I’d say this to Minister Chambers. To paraphrase Roy Keane; “Do your job!”.} 

_{For the first time in a generation, thanks to Minister Chambers, nurses, teachers, SNAs, Council workers, you name it, will be out on strike next week. I do not blame them.} 

_{It is no coincidence that this only happens when Fianna Fail are in office!}

_{We have a headline fiscal surplus, but the underlying position is in deficit.} 

_{The pre-election gimmicks, panicky, pricey crisis interventions of suspect social value that wouldn’t be needed if our tax, social welfare, capital and public services worked like the countries we should compare ourselves to.} 

_{The extraordinary thing is that despite all of this, public spending in Ireland is still below the average.} 

_{But this Budget before us today still eats into the surplus for day-to-day spending. And this is not an academic or abstract point.}

_{A surplus far too reliant on non-sticky corporation tax receipts generated from a few products and patents from fewer than a handful of companies.} 

_{Half of our entire business tax take is likely to be transitory.} 

_{If you ignore IFAC, the ESRI, the Central Bank and so many others with a basic understanding of this, then you’ll keep ignoring me too.} 

_{Paschal wasn’t prudent. Simon isn’t sensible. And so it goes on. Rinse and repeat.} 

_{And a budget process divorced from the reality of how to pay for it, means for another year we avoid the hard questions about tax and spending,} 

_{Where instead of increasing taxes on wealth you are massively, and permanently reducing them.}

_*********

_{Labour has shown in our alternative budget how you can be fiscally responsible and economically and socially ambitious at the same time.}

_{Why can’t we have world class childcare?}

_{Why can’t we house our people?}

_{Why can’t we have secure incomes for those reliant on social protection?}

_{Why can’t we end child poverty?} 

_{Because you choose not to. It is that simple.} 

_{At least we are honest and transparent when we say that an Ireland we can all afford needs to be paid for.} 

_{The lie at the heart of the government position is that we can cut taxes, hike spending and pay for it all from a surplus that, that at least for now, keeps on giving.} 

_{You have left yourself with damn all for new measures, and that’s why we have a bit here on childcare, a bit there for people with disabilities.}

_{The truth is you are not overspending on health and education. You make political decisions to underfund them, and run to piece the services together again with supplementary funding.} 

_{The real change the Irish people know they need means more tax from wealth, and less from work.} 

_{We have a government that hasn’t met a tax it wants to increase and some in opposition who say they are on the left, but they have never met a tax, even a progressive one like the LPT or the USC, that they didn’t want to abolish.} 

_{This is the intellectual dishonesty that’s holding Ireland back.} 

_{Last week I said we needed an honest debate about tax and spending. How we plan for the future, responsibly.} 

_{Today’s Budget isn’t it. The dishonesty goes on. And on.} 

_{ENERGY AND CLIMATE}

_{The greatest worry for people this winter is energy bills. Oil, gas, electricity, petrol, diesel– all fossil fuel energy costs have exploded.} 

_{But this government is only helping some.} 

_{The choices made this week last year are coming home to roost when workers were left less able to absorb rising costs last year’s two fingers to PAYE workers.}

_{That decision will haunt this government until the next election and Labour will make sure of that.} 

_{You’ve repeated that mistake by not funding energy credits for this winter.} 

_{We get why carbon tax rises have been paused, along with excise rate restoration on fuels at the pump. Nobody wants to load worry upon worry for the people we all care about. Especially so, in a winter where energy costs will only go one way, alongside the strain of the weekly shop.} 

_{We do not buy the line from government that the VAT on home heating oil cannot go down to 9%. The case can be made in Europe, and I believe the government is being selective. This alone would shave over €70 off each full fill, and with most families having two fills a year, there are savings to be had, on top of your carbon tax cut.} 

_{The truth is that no amount of carbon tax cuts or excise adjustments is going to make life any easier or cheaper in the end for the people we represent.} 

_{The answer to carbon tax is simple. Less carbon.} 

_{Less carbon, demands massive investment and honest conversations.}

_{The transition we need costs money.} 

_{The very best way to help families in the short term is through the tax and welfare system. This is proven.} 

_{This government has chosen to chase the price and not the core problem.} 

_{We have half a million householders in gas and energy bill arrears. They are more often than not the same people. The CRU says the average for electricity is €512, and it’s €224 for gas. That would have been covered if you indexed tax for someone earning close to €50,000 this year.} 

_{We have the highest electricity prices in Europe. We are especially exposed because of our reliance on imported gas to generate power. With a rise of 77% in the wholesale price, this winter will make the winters of 2023 and 2024 look like a cakewalk.} 

_{You threw €3billion at energy credits last time out, all because an election was on the horizon. Now, three years from the next one people worried sick about their bills can swing in the wind for all you care.} 

_{And where is the report of the Energy Affordability Taskforce? We were due to have it this autumn. It is being suppressed because, as I understand it, it says you won’t have the systems to do targeted energy supports up and running until next year. This is embarrassing.} 

_{A full five years after Putin trained his fire on Ukraine, you have learned nothing from the 2022 to 2024 shock, and the impact on families and businesses.} 

_{1.2million homes bringing in less than €80,000 a year need the €400 credit we have long argued for to help them through the rough few months ahead.}

_{Here’s the thing nobody understands. As a country, we had the sophisticated systems to manage a wage subsidy scheme to protect jobs and incomes as soon as we decided to do it, almost overnight. A credit to our country, and to our public service.} 

_{We have so much rich data available on BER ratings, MPRNs, from smart meters, from Revenue and from the electricity firms and the grid that it baffles me that five years on from what will not be the last energy shock in this turbulent world, that we cannot seem to get the money to where it is needed most, and quickly.} 

_{It is clear from the EU that we can decide – as Portugal has done – to slap a windfall tax on the Emperors of Energy – to foot the bill for all of this. Yet, you are letting them off the hook. The template is there. In excess of €260m was raised a few short years ago in this way, with the minimum of fuss. That you will not do this is just baffling. While Simon is “facilitating conversations” on this with his fellow Finance Ministers, the sleepless nights in homes across Ireland go on.} 

_{A just transition will cost money, but we have it. What we do not have is the political will and leadership.}

_{It means helping farmers and rural workers with the really big stuff.} 

_{It’s planting our flag in our sea and putting money into generating cheap electricity from our greatest asset.}

_{It’s spending half a billion on plug-in solar, and with rooftop solar to permanently help bring bills down, something we will take for granted in a few short years.} 

_{That’s the spirit and the genius and the vision that built Ardnacrusha.}

_{INCOME TAX} 

_{Budget 2026 saw no tax relief for PAYE workers. This is from where today’s angst can trace its roots. You abandoned them. Instead, you spent close to €1b instead on cushioning the bottom line of the burger barons and big builders.} 

_{There won’t be much change out of €3b from the VAT break you lashed out to the chicken chains last year, when the total bill comes in in 2030. A massive transfer of wealth from workers to the business.} 

_{Your locked in now, but this is a really bad decision that will haunt you all come the next election.} 

_{If you took a different path, this saving alone could have seen you move the top tax bracket to €50,000 by next year. They are the trade-offs and you should front up on this.} 

_{It looks like the election pledge made on the stump by Simon in 2024 counts for more than the promise made to ordinary workers in the Programme for Government.} 

_{Middle and low-income workers know exactly where they stand with FG and FF. At the back of the queue.} 

_{They know that the point at which they start paying the higher rate of tax comes earlier than pretty much anywhere else in Europe.} 

_{And they know they’re being played, gaslit by this government.} 

_{You see the big lie of this Budget is on income tax.} 

_{What you are doing on PAYE isn’t exactly tax cuts.} 

_{It’s basic indexation and a bit more in a bid to make up for last year’s mess.} 

_{A move made as a matter of routine in other well-off countries that makes sure your small wage rise isn’t all taken up because of bracket-creep.} 

_{We were told adjustments would be meaningful. Then they were modest. Now they are meaningless.} 

_{Meaningless because the few hundred euros next year will be worth to the average worker is already gone.} 

_{It might just about cover he annual increase families have faced on grocery bills in recent times.}

_{Working families are in no mood to forgive you, or to forget.} 

_{An awful lot of heavy lifting needs to be done because of last year’s epic fail to keep your promise that only the part of your income that’s in excess of €50,000 would be taxed at the top rate.} 

_{Tánaiste, it is to your eternal disgrace that you have dropped the Living Wage.} 

_{That you even allowed a headline to fester over the weekend that threatened, for the first time since the creation of the Low Pay Commission, the rejection of their 79 cent an hour on the minimum wage was on the cards, should see you all hang your heads in shame.}

_{The Living Wage has now been left to another government to sort, 11 years to the week that I hosted Ireland’s very first – and indeed at this stage, only –  government-backed Forum on a Living Wage, in Dublin Castle.} 

_{GENERAL TAX POINTS} 

_{There is only one body whose expert recommendations are more honoured in the breach than the observance than the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council, and that’s the Commission on Taxation & Welfare.}

_{Their report of 2022 made a series of recommendations, and their careful analysis said there is a menu of options – totalling €14b all told – for sustainable revenue raising measures that would not harm jobs and real enterprise. As it happens, that’s in or around the total windfall part of our corporation tax that could be at risk.} 

_{Hardly a single recommendation has been entertained by this government or its predecessor.} 

_{There should be a medium-term plan to broaden the tax base but you have no plan to do so.} 

_{Labour has shown year after year how we can broaden the base by increasing the bank levy to €500m, put stamp duty on share buybacks, increase taxes on REITs and IREFs, end SARP and keep other wasteful so-called temporary tax expenditures under constant review. The will simply is not there from you to do this.}

_{Regardless, you will plough on with inheritance tax and CGT cuts, as the base narrows and the demands on the exchequer grow. This really is a budget for investors and not workers and when your CGT cut comes in later, the bill will be close to €50m for the rest of the year and close to €200m next. In other words, that’s half the cost of the energy credit you won’t do.}

_{SAVINGS AND INVESTMENT ACCOUNTS} 

_{Nothing tells us more about the MO of the Tanaiste than “Simon’s Savings Scheme”.} 

_{Soft launched 379 times already this year, when I asked him last week what the new account would mean for tax foregone, all he could say here was that “work is underway” on an economic impact assessment.} 

_{This is so on-brand and typical of this government’s half-assed approach to everything.}

_{IBEC’s Financial Services group at least made an attempt to quantify the impact on the Exchequer and in a responsible way.}

_{They said a 10% take up might mean €54m foregone in tax in Year One.} 

_{Now, the picture is a little clearer and on deemed disposal and related issues, too.} 

_{We know what the tax treatment of these new accounts will involve, and how you say they will work.}

_{But, my word, has Simon become the salesman-in-chief and he will have a bit of explaining to do to disappointed investors who took their cash out of their safe ban k account and placed some bets in ETFs and so on. Looking at the way bond yields are going in the US, and the delayed impact that tends to have on the stock market, caution is to be advised.}

_{This could end in tears and recrimination and the Tanaiste’s name is all over it.}

_{But let’s be honest. This has taken up so much political bandwidth for government and capital and time for the Minister for Finance, in the middle of a severe cost of living and housing crisis, I for one am wondering if he gets how much this scheme, how invested in it he is and the timing of it jars with those of us who are lying awake worrying about the keeping food in the fridge and the lights on.} 

_{I get the principle of this, but at this moment in time, given the struggles of hard working people for whom this is the ultimate minority sport, this is a reverse Robin Hood job.} 

_{That this is a priority for FG tells us all we need to know.} 

_HOUSING 

_{We are now firmly in the you can’t make it up territory on housing.} 

_{There is little on the capital or current side of today’s Budget that’s going to put a safe, secure roof over the heads of the 18,000 people who officially have none, tonight.} 

_{Can I suggest Fianna Fail goes and buys the Daft.ie domain name so ridiculous were the demand-side wheezes dreamed up and floated prior to the Budget?}

_{When a Fianna Failer tells us abolishing stamp duty for first-time buyers is a good idea, he should be sent straight to ED with a letter from his doctor.}

_{When the Minister for Housing himself starts a tone-deaf media campaign and bangs on about adding 20k to the €30,000 tax break known as ‘Help to Buy’, we know we are through the looking glass.}

_{Mock battles that are offensive to the people I represent who can only dream of owning their own place.} 

_{Two years in, the Housing Minister still clearly doesn’t actually get housing.} 

_{If inflating house prices further out of the reach of too many is your end game, fire ahead. I see the Minister got an extra €5,000 on HTB.} 

_{We have at the last count a dizzying array of 34 different housing incentives, so-called.}

_{This includes Cummins’s Cabins.} 

_{Building more homes, plain and simple, is the only solution.} 

_{That’s why your ambition on the capital is so disappointing. On social housing. On cost rental. On affordable purchase.}

_{The ESRI, Central Bank and others make it clear that only 39,000 new homes will be built this year, with an increase of a further 1,000 in 2028.} 

_{At this rate of annual, recurring failure, we will be 340,000 homes short of where we need to be based on when the Housing Commission issued its report in 2022.} 

_{This is way below the very basic level of 50,000 needed and the further away from those targets you get, the bigger the problem gets. So many of these end up as turnkey developments for Councils and AHBs and that in itself is causing social division, and affecting supply in the market.}

_{Because you aren’t doing enough direct Council builds, this is a tension you are creating.} 

_{House prices have soared by 161% since 2012 and rents are up by 121%.}

_{Income has grown by 46%. This is your challenge. The house that should be available for the ordinary worker is beyond anyone but those who have can depend on the folks or the inheritance from grandparents. A home of your own should not be a privilege or based on luck and family.} 

_{When I first became a TD the fear of losing your job was the biggest anxiety.}

_{Now, it’s the fear of losing your rental. And with the highest rent increases on record since 2002, where is the promised HAP review?}

_{We fixed the jobs piece, you still haven’t a breeze how to fix housing.}

_{You need to take the bull by the horns. Transform the LDA into a State Construction Company. Allocate the additional billion plus in capital we need to add to your social, affordable and rental targets, and get on with it.} 

_{CHILD POVERTY} 

_{This could have been a budget for children, but it is far from it.}

_{Poor children live in poor families. Poor children and their families were cold and they were hungry before this cost of living crisis.} 

_{Now, thanks to government inaction, there are more of them who will be cold and who will be hungry this winter.} 

_{For a dozen years we have known the solution. Hungry kids can’t eat child poverty roadmaps.} 

_{We know hot this gets fixed. It gets fixed with a second-tier of targeted child benefit.}

_{And you know what, it costs the exact same as the hospitality VAT cut for this year, closer to €880m a year.} 

_{The difference is that poor kids can’t hire lobbyists and their families don’t vote for FG or FF.}

_{We acknowledge the moves on the Qualified Child Payment and the WFP.} 

_{But with rising levels of children in poverty – and with the tools at the ready to sort it – and the resources available if you choose to use them –  this is no time for Micheal Martin’s crippling, characteristic caution and incrementalism.}

_{Bite the bullet. Bring in the second tier. It would be a fitting legacy for the Taoiseach, the man who, 26 years ago, signed off on Ireland’s first national child poverty targets in the first National Children’s Strategy, and 26 years later, manages to keep missing them and contrives to see them continue to rise, under his watch.} 

_{The response to child poverty demands urgency, courage, single-mindedness.} 

_{Anything else is indifference. An unforgiveable moral failure.} 

_{SOCIAL PROTECTION} 

_{Let’s call a spade a spade. €10 on the pension, on the carers’ allowance and all other weekly payments is in fact a cut.}

_{There was a real-life cut in last year’s Budget, and you did the same again for next year.}

_{A 3% hike sees social welfare payments fall behind the rate of inflation.}

_{In plain language this means you can afford to buy less.} 

_{We said put €15 on the payment to keep the value. You are over €40 away from meeting the pension promise of €350 a week. There is a long way to go, and politically, pensioners keep receipts.} 

_{Like on PAYE you need to index link social welfare weekly payments to provide security for the future and certainty to the public finances, and then benchmark rates to 27.5% of average earnings.} 

_{Labour has campaigned for years for a cost of disability payment. You have now at least conceded the principle.  We argued for an initial €30 per week rising to €55. Your scheme is worth less than a tenner a week.} 

_{And can we stop passing off the double-welfare payment at Christmas as news. It’s cynical and it’s not news. Put it in the department’s spending base, be done with it and get rid of the patronising, demeaning  ‘Christmas Bonus’ description?}

_{Again, for the umpteenth year in a row, there is nothing on child benefit and that demands an explanation. Why did it not go up by the €10 we suggested?}

_{Much more needs to be done on State backed leave arrangements for parents. The paternity leave period has not increased since we brought it in in 2016, and we support the Full Year of Care campaign} 

_EDUCATION

_{Cutting the cost of education cuts costs for families.}

_{That’s why in this Budget, you should have done what Labour proposed.} 

_{A Universal Back to School Allowance of worth €160 for under 12s, and €185 for second level and college students under 22 would be money well spent, considering you did nothing  on the children’s allowance.} 

_{And it would cost a tiny amount to ban voluntary contributions by upping the capitation but there’s little to see here.}

_{The digital divide in classrooms is very real, and we provided for an additional €15m in this space to fund devices via the Free Books Scheme.} 

_{The Minister has made a dog’s dinner off DEIS+, a key programme we helped pioneer.}

_{For €3m you could add ten more schools that have been left out because of the Department’s suspect scoring system.}

_{It looks too like we will still have among the largest classes in the EU, in terms of the PTR.} 

_{My colleague Marie Sherlock will speak more in depth on the scandal of school places for children with autism and children with additional needs more generally.} 

_{The answer is better planning, co-ordination, more staff and classrooms.}