Ministers under fire over Budget
THE Government defended itself yesterday against accusations that the Budget did little to tackle the rising cost of living.
Public Expenditure Minister Michael McGrath and Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe said that most Irish people would see some kind of benefit from the €4.7billion Budget package they announced on Tuesday.
Both faced questions from the public during a phone-in on RTÉ Radio 1’s Today With Claire Byrne programme.
In call after call, listeners pointed to the spiralling cost of rent and the increased cost of fuel and childcare.
Listeners, who included nurses, pensioners and construction workers, asked why there was little announced on Tuesday to support renters, as well as a lack of measures designed to tackle lengthening hospital waiting lists.
Mr McGrath said: ‘To people who make the point that we spread the money too thinly, you have to back that up by saying where we shouldn’t have spent the money.’
Both ministers stressed that, in successive budgets, the Government was trying to improve things.
‘Budget by budget, when we’re making changes in taxation, it’s not about division,’ Mr Donohoe told one listener.
‘It’s trying to make progress on all the priorities we’ve heard across this programme.’
One listener named Paul asked why more had not been done for people facing huge rents.
‘It feels to me that it’s all piecemeal solutions and they don’t go to the core of the issue,’ he told the radio programme.
Mr Donohoe, referring to the Government’s Housing For All plan, said that the plan was to build more homes.
He also said that renters hoping to buy a home could benefit from the extension of the Help To Buy scheme.
‘I absolutely recognise the frustration and the worry that it’s causing so many at the moment, but the way in which we ultimately have the best chance of fixing this is by having more homes,’ he said.
One caller, Mary Teresa from Donegal, asked what the Government is doing on a mica redress scheme. Mr McGrath referred to plans for a revised scheme to address the concerns of homeowners whose houses are crumbling due to defective mica building blocks, but gave no details in Tuesday’s Budget. He said the Government would have a full proposal in the coming weeks. ‘I made the legitimate point, in the interest of taxpayers generally, we have to ask who can assist the State in meeting this cost,’ he said. He added that this may include banks and insurance companies.
‘It doesn’t necessarily all have to fall on the State,’ he said.
It was revealed in Tuesday’s Budget that 7,000 new healthcare workers are to be added across the health system.
However, a nurse, who is on sick leave due to ‘burnout’, yesterday told the ministers that they will have great difficulty filling these posts.
‘Mary’ told the show that she and her husband are both nurses and are both on stress leave due to burnout.
She added that staff are so overworked that they are not able to take their annual leave.
‘This is a little bit too late… Ireland’s call. We got 1,000 staff of the 10,000 you promised,’ she said.
‘I’d like to see where you’re going to get this staff in recruitment and fill those 7,000 posts… you’re in for a very big wake-up call when you arrive into an A&E.’
‘It’s all piecemeal solutions’