Budget 2015

5th October 2014 - Olivia Mitchell TD

In the three minutes I have to speak it is not possible to comment in detail on any or all of the elements of the budget. However, having listened yesterday to the litany from the Opposition of all the spending measures that were not included in it, I thought it was important to say something about what it was actually about.

The saddest day for the country and me personally was the day it was revealed we had to seek a bailout from the IMF. That signalled the end of everything we had achieved as a nation on the economic front. The future looked utterly hopeless and it seemed impossible to believe we would ever see better times again. In 2011, when we went into government, the economy was still tumbling and, worse, we just did not know where the bottom was. The significance of this budget is not that it is party time again – it is certainly not a giveaway pre-election budget – but that, with the end of cuts, it is now possible to have some hope about our future economic fortunes. When I use the word “hope”, it is not a hope we can return to the levels of Government spending on services we enjoyed in the Celtic tiger years; that is a truth to which we all have to face up. That level of spending, even with full employment and a booming economy, was unaffordable and it never will be. It was that overspending, far more than the banks, that plunged us so deeply into the abyss when the crash came. We will never return there, however much we may hanker after limitless spending, and this budget does not even pretend to do so. Neither is it a hope everyone who lost assets, a pension, an income, a home and a job will ever recover them because many will not. Many will never recover them, certainly older people, for example, those in their 50s who lost their jobs and will never work again. However, it is a hope our future and that of our children might be secure again; that we can again envisage economic certainty; that the cuts are at an end; that the new taxes and painful increases in taxes are over; that if we find a job, we will keep it; that if we have a home, we will not lose it; that if we have a pension, it will not vaporise; and that if we have none of these things, the State will be in a position to look after us.

Of itself, the budget will not dramatically change lifestyles for anyone, nor does it pretend to do so. It will take many years for us to grow out of our debt. Its significance as a budget is its vindication of the sacrifices of the people in the past seven years and the promise it offers of better times to come. None of this is happening by accident. The Ministers, Deputy Michael Noonan and Deputy Brendan Howlin, in the past three years imposed taxes and cuts that we know have hurt a lot of people, as both they and the Opposition have been telling us. However, the truth is that these are policies that have worked and are working, painful as they are, and they will probably be painful for some years to come. Nonetheless, the economy is growing, people are going back to work and, most of all, confidence is returning that we can have a secure future. The Government and the Ministers who have achieved this on our behalf deserve to be commended and lauded and I believe history will do so.

Budget 2015

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