The Government’s emergency budget has targeted the vulnerable in order to pay for the “misbehaviour and fraud” of others, and allows many of those who created the current crisis to escape, one of the main social partners said. Publishing its analysis of the budget, CORI Justice said Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan had made several references to the common good in his speech yesterday.
“The budget, however, does not measure up to the rhetoric.”
Director of CORI Justice Fr Sean Healy said the budget lacked a guiding vision, which in turn gave rise to some very serious problems.
“The budget allows many of those who created the present series of crises, particularly the banks, to escape. At the same time the vulnerable, particularly children, are targeted to pay for the misbehaviour and fraud of others.”
Fr Healy said the Government had made a “sensible decision” to change its borrowing parameters. It had, however, shown a “profound lack of understanding of the social crisis that Ireland is currently facing”.
“In its description of the social crisis Government identified only the issue of unemployment. While this is a critically important issue there are major problems also concerning children, older people, people with disabilities or those who are ill - all of whom have seen their services reduced over the past year.”
CORI Justice said that in defining the social crisis in terms of unemployment only, the Government failed to appreciate the “huge negative impact that cuts in services are having” and the impact that the failure to address the social infrastructure deficits would have in years to come.
Criticising the decision to establish a new agency to take over so-called ‘toxic debt’ from the banks, the organisation said this meant the banks would be “free to continue as before”.
“On the other hand the taxpayer will underpin a new National Asset Management Agency which will take on assets potentially as high as €90 billion but which will be ‘transferred at an appropriate discount’ which has not been decided.”
The abolition of the early childcare supplement and the proposal to tax or means test child benefit from next year would see supports for children reduced at the very time when families’ incomes were under serious threat, CORI Justice said.
The organisation noted a number of “positive steps” and “progressive” steps to build a fairer tax system and to increase the tax take and it welcomed that the Government did not reduce the income levy exemption threshold to zero.
But it said more than 30 per cent of households at risk of poverty were headed by a person with a job.
“Consequently, we urge Government that as resources become available it should restore the policy of keeping the minimum wage outside the tax net.”
The organisation also criticised what it said was a lack of transparency about the social housing budget, but it said it appeared there would be a “substantial reduction” in capital expenditure. “This would be a very retrograde step,” it added.
It also criticised the reduction in Overseas Development Aid to 0.48 per cent of GNP as “an attack on the world’s poorest people” and called for this to be reversed.
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(Source: IT)