Sinn Féin says Coalition has produced a ‘budget for landlords’

The Government has produced a “budget for landlords” rather than one for renters, Sinn Féin has said.

The party’s finance spokesman, Pearse Doherty, said without a ban on rent increases in the budget the Minister for Finance “may as well have written the cheque...and stuffed it into the pockets of landlords”.

Speaking in the Dáil, Mr Doherty added that “not content with writing one cheque for landlords” the Government had decided to “write them another one” by giving them a tax break worth between €600 and €1,000.

The Donegal TD said Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil had caused the housing crisis, and that the budget was “further confirmation that they are not the ones to fix it”.

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“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 gotten to grips with the housing crisis and built the homes our people so desperately need.”

Labour’s finance spokesman, Ged Nash, said the Government had unveiled “a Reeling in the Years budget – a lazy rerun of all that was wrong with Budget 2023″.

He said there were tax cuts that favoured the better-off, a failure to fund public services and “a wad of once-off payments, but no permanent change”.

“Like the Late Late Show, we’ve changed the faces, but the formula is the same no matter who’s fronting the gig, Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael, it simply doesn’t matter.”

The Louth TD pointed out that it was the first time since 2010 that a Fianna Fáil finance minister had delivered the budget and that Mr McGrath had given “nonsensical tax reliefs to landlords – same old Fianna Fáil”.

Social Democrats TD Róisín Shortall said she was struggling to understand what exactly was the aim of the budget and that it “sounds very much like Budget 2023 light”.

She said it included “a bit for everyone” but “a fair bit more for some who actually don’t need it”, and there was an emphasis on short-term measures rather than lasting structural measures and “not a whole lot that would substantially change our country for the better” in the medium to longer term.

People Before Profit TD Richard Boyd Barrett said the Government were trying to “dazzle and fool” people with once-off measures but the reality was that poverty, deprivation, financial hardship and inequality were not “once-off phenomena – they are systemic”.

The Dún Laoghaire TD said the Government had done “nothing above and beyond” its Housing For All plan, which was “failing catastrophically”.