
Flush with a €25 billion surplus the coalition government has published a budget for 2025 that would gladden the heart of ‘Celtic Tiger’ era Bertie Ahern.
There will be increases to a wide range of social protection payments, combined with additional one-off lump-sum payments. All of which is perfectly consistent with the ruthless free-market fundamentalism that informs the politics of Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Green Party.
While extra money is always welcome, the working class must see beyond yet another attempt to bribe us with our own money. Particularly a few weeks away from an election.
Establishment parties and their apologists in the media love nothing more than a bit of Budget pantomime every October. But a budget does not, and is never intended to, address the profound structural crises that afflict society and continue to compromise the lives of millions of workers and their families.
Minimum Wage
The 80 cent per hour increase in the minimum wage is a good practical example of this. At a superficial level this increase is good news. Yet the minimum wage remains well below the agreed living wage. After two years of a Cost-of-Living Crisis, and in a society with the most expensive housing in Europe, the living wage itself is increasingly a poverty level wage. More than 400,000 workers remain on low pay and Budget 2025 will not change that.
A whole plethora of tax reliefs, temporary credits, small one-off payments are scattered across Budget 2025, but all of these will hardly dent the enduring economic hardship that continues to be imposed on many working people in what is statistically the second richest country in the world.
Fundamental public services, like early years childcare, will continue to be scarred by sky high costs for parents, combined with poverty level wages for childcare workers, and handsome profits for creche owners!
Public Services
Key public services like childcare must be integrated into the public sector and delivered free or at very low cost. Thousands of psychologists, nurses, social workers and professional staff must be hired to deliver autism services and Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services to meet the huge existing needs which are often unmet or addressed far too late. Yet, Simon Harris and Jack Chambers believe flinging a few hundred euro at these profound social issues is enough.
The political establishment, all firmly within the top 5% of income earners, have literally no understanding of what it is like for low and middle-income workers to navigate what passes for the welfare state.
They are deeply hostile, and have been since 1922, to building the kind of comprehensive welfare state that is badly needed – one which includes a functioning public health service and mass local authority housing. Instead, they are intent on keeping with the failing for-profit, market based, system for delivering vital public services, such as childcare and autism supports. This model of public service provision inevitably excludes tens of thousands who urgently need access to these services.
The Budget was a blatant bribe by a dysfunctional coalition government that has overseen a disastrous housing crisis as well as the ongoing degradation of the public health system. All at a time when for every euro paid in wages to a worker, eight euros in profits are being made by the capitalist class.
While it serves the establishment’s interests to dish out some of the surplus now, when the next downturn comes, which it inevitably will, they will again devastate social protection, public sector pay and the public health service.