Budget Choices 2022 contains detailed, fully-costed Budgetary packages across more than a dozen policy areas including health, housing, education, welfare, sustainability and more; it also contains a range of costed, revenue-raising proposals.
Despite the immediate uncertainty, Budget 2022 must embrace the need for new approaches to how we as a society prioritise choices. People, well-being, public services and a widespread and fair recovery must come first.
The Programme for Government contained several commitments which, if fully resourced and implemented, would represent significant steps towards creating a fairer and more just Ireland. As we emerge into a new post-Covid reality, our latest National Social Monitor looks at whether Government is delivering on its commitments in key areas and suggests that, so far, Government’s achievements are not matching its commitments.
How we plan our finances, and what we choose to prioritise, post-Covid-19, will have profound implications for the future of our economy and society. To this end Social Justice Ireland proposed to the Select Committee on Budgetary Oversight that the priorities for Budget 2022 should be adequate social welfare rates and poverty reduction, just taxation, housing for all and tackling unemployment.
The Economic Recovery Plan announced today, while welcome, is not of the scale required to address the social, economic and environmental challenges that we now face. Covid-19 has brought extraordinary social and economic costs. Alongside this, the challenges that existed pre-Covid remain and cannot be ignored
Over the past few years Social Justice Ireland has developed its ability to track the distributive impact of annual Budgets on households across Irish society. Our analysis tracks changes from year to year (pre and post each Budget) and across a number of recent years. As different policy priorities can be articulated for each Budget, it is useful to bring together the cumulative effect of policy changes on various household types.
The need for a wider tax base is a lesson painfully learnt by Ireland during the last economic crisis. A disastrous combination of a naïve housing policy, a failed regulatory system, and foolish fiscal policy and economic planning caused a collapse in exchequer revenues. It is only through a strategic and determined effort to reform Ireland’s taxation system that these mistakes can avoided in the future.
Annex 4 accompanies chapter 4 'Taxation' in Social Justice Matters: 2021 guide to a fairer Irish Society.
In its annual Socio-Economic Review Social Justice Ireland argues that fundamental changes are required if Ireland is to have a fair recovery post-pandemic. Returning to pre-Covid normal would mean failure. A new Social Contract is needed and it can be developed and delivered.
