The Irish people deserve better.
This is the not unreasonable thrust of ICTU’s pre-budget submission for 2017.
People deserve better than the five-in-a-row inequality-increasing budgets they were subjected under the previous Fine Gael-led government.
People deserve more investment in the health, education and welfare services on which they depend: more hospital beds, more special needs assistants, more home care packages. These can make a real and positive improvement in people’s immediate living standards, while reducing reliance on the sort of spending that becomes necessary when such early interventions have been in short supply. Home care packages are a prime example. For a relatively small outlay, people can be helped to live a full life in their homes and in their communities, as they grow older, rather than being carted off to a more expensive hospital or nursing home.
The country also urgently needs to ramp up its capital spending programme to address the housing crisis and plug the most critical infrastructure gaps that are holding our economy back. The Action Plan for Housing and Homelessness is clearly welcome, but it’s a case of too little too late. The housing crisis has been brewing for years as the dysfunctional rental and owner-occupier property markets have been allowed to fester. The Plan’s social housing target of 5,000 new builds per year by 2021 – from next to zero currently – lacks ambition in the face of the scale of the emergency. More generally, capital spending has been cut to the bone since 2008. Under-investment in public transport, rural broadband, flood defence, waste management and water infrastructure reduce living standards today while imposing constraints on future economic growth.
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