You built it up by zero this year.

You built it up by zero this year.

You built it up by a total of zero.

How much did you build it up this year? Zero. You are the Minister for Defence. At least Donnelly went looking for the money.

At least Donnelly went looking for the money.

The number one issue facing workers and families is the housing crisis. It permeates every facet of Irish life. Young people are left without hope, children are growing up in emergency accommodation, businesses cannot get workers, schools cannot get teachers, and gardaí, nurses, members of our Defence Forces are leaving their profession because they cannot find somewhere to live. This should have been a budget to resolve the housing crisis, but today, the Ministers for Finance and for Public Expenditure, National D…

Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil have caused the housing crisis and today's budget is further confirmation that they are not the ones to fix it. We needed a budget for renters; instead we got a budget for landlords. A Sinn Féin Government would have introduced a budget that would have got to grips with the housing crisis and built the homes our people so desperately need. Access to healthcare is one of the most fundamental needs of any citizen - knowing your child will be able to receive critical surgeries or mental healt…

The reality is this Government has normalised child homelessness and that should never be accepted in this State. Is this the society we want to be? It is not. The two Ministers have been in government, as the Minister, Deputy Donohoe, said, for just over three years now. Let us look at their record on housing. Since taking office, average rents have increased by 33%. That means the average renter is paying €5,000 more in rent every single year since this Government took office just over three years ago. Those who …

It is a clear message, if there ever was one, to workers and families that under this Government, in terms of housing, things will not get better. Indeed, they will get worse. Sinn Féin has set out a plan. We said very clearly that what should have been in this budget was the biggest State-supported construction of social, affordable and cost-rental houses in the history of the State, delivering 21,000 public homes next year. That is what it is needed. That is the ambition and the scale of the crisis but the Govern…

We need to increase the supply of affordable homes to rent and buy. For many years, Sinn Féin has also called for the introduction of a refundable tax credit to put one month's rent back into renters' pockets and for this to be introduced, crucially, alongside a three-year ban on rent increases. For years, this proposal was criticised time and again by the Government and by these Ministers. Last year, the Government performed an embarrassing U-turn and introduced a botched tax credit which more than half of renters…

He has decided to put taxpayers' money into the pockets of landlords. You simply could not make this up. In this budget, the Government has provided nearly twice as much to landlords as it has to struggling renters. The Minister knows fine well, because the experts in his Department told him, that the vast majority of these landlords never even thought about leaving the rental market. This sop to landlords will go down as one of the stupidest tax reliefs ever to be provided by a Minister for Finance in recent times…

In the past 15 months, the European Central Bank, ECB, has increased its key lending rate ten times. The Minister knows now that many households are feeling the sudden, sharp increases in the mortgage crisis. For many it is a massive income shock. As we know, this has happened in the context of the wider cost-of-living crisis. Will the Minister commit to introducing temporary and targeted mortgage interest relief in next week's budget to support those families? Many of them, as the Central Bank has said, are paying…

This has been going on now for 15 months. The ECB has said very clearly that one in five mortgage holders have seen their mortgage interest increase by €5,700 on average since last year and one in three is paying €3,000 more than last year. We have come up with a proposal that would take 30% of that increased mortgage interest into the State's coffers and where it would be paid for by the State, up to a maximum of €1,500. We have asked the Minister to come up with a proposal for over a year now and he has not. This…

The reality is that the Government has been found wanting in relation to mortgage interest relief. For the last year, as letter after letter landed in the letterboxes of families across the State, month after month, with ten letters now telling them that their mortgage interest rate has gone up if they are on a tracker mortgage, the Minister has come forward with nothing. There are no proposals and there is nothing to support these families in the form of mortgage relief, and that is not acceptable. In 2016, when i…

As the Minister is aware, the volatility in the international oil markets has seen a steady increase in the price of home heating oil. Home heating oil prices have increased by 30% in the past two months. More than a one third of households across the State use home heating oil as their main source of fuel. In this context, is the Minister considering tax measures to support households with the rising cost of heating, in particular those using home heating oil?

More than one third of homes across the State use home heating oil as their primary heating source. This rises to two thirds if you look at the border region, including my own county of Donegal. More than half of households in the south-east and western regions use home heating oil as their primary heating source. In the past two months, the average price of home heating oil has increased by nearly 30%, adding €240 to the cost of filling a tank. We know there is volatility in the international markets, as I have me…

Since the energy crisis began, this Government has increased the price of home heating oil twice, and is planning to do so again next May, unless it changes track in the budget. Everything the Minister has said so far suggests that it will not. This is in addition to the increases we have seen in the market price. This is putting additional pressure on households, and there has been an unfair gap in Government policy when it comes to tax on household energy prices in the past year. VAT rates have been reduced for e…

In June, the European Commission published an adjusted package for the new generation of own resources. With this package, the Commission proposes a new statistical-based own resource linked to the corporate sector. The proposals are, on the face of it, the Commission’s grab for Irish corporate profits. Sinn Féin opposes the proposal. Will the Minister outline his position and that of the Government on the proposal?

I thank the Minister for his response. I believe it is important there is political consensus on this issue but also across Europe in trying to build support for our position. The Commission's proposal, as the Minister said, is one of an own resource that would be calculated at 0.5% of the notional company profit base, an indicator calculated by Eurostat on the basis of the national count statistics. While the Commission claimed it is not a tax, the truth is that the proposal approximates to company profits or gros…

As the Minister mentioned, the cost of this proposal to the State would be an additional €1.124 billion per annum and, obviously, that could increase depending on our gross operating surplus. It is a significant increase and I understand Ireland would be one of the highest contributors as a result of this mechanism. In his response, the Minister might outline the distributional impact and where Ireland would sit in the league table in respect of contributions to the budget if this proposal were to go ahead. As the …