Labour and Fine Gael deceit at Dublin City Council Budget 2014 meeting

» Mícheál Mac Donncha

Labour rides in on a white horse posing as the saviour of the people for avoiding cuts (arising from their own Government’s actions), cuts that should never have been proposed in the first place!

IT WAS an extraordinary meeting of Dublin City Council on Tuesday night.

A draft Dublin City Council budget was published last week which proposed to impose rent rises, cuts to homeless services and cuts to grants for disabled and older people to adapt their homes, among a raft of other unacceptable measures.

In recent days, the Labour Party had signalled their opposition to the rent rises, homeless and disability/older people cuts. Then Labour went into conclave with Fine Gael and with their colleagues in Government. Suddenly, out of nowhere, in the space of two days, the money was found to avoid these three cuts. And, hey presto, Labour rides in on a white horse posing as the saviour of the people for avoiding cuts (arising from their own Government’s actions), cuts that should never have been proposed in the first place!

The first the Sinn Féin and the other non-FG/Lab councillors saw of the Fine Gael/Labour amendments to the budget was when we walked into the council chamber in Dublin City Hall on Tuesday night.

Astonishingly, we were told that the money had been found from revised estimates within the Council budget and from a verbal promise from the Government that signalled grant reductions would not take place.

Equally astonishingly, we were told that the previously signalled 14% rent rise from a new Government rent scheme in 2015 is now to be phased in over three years. Yet we had been told previously that the threatened 7% rent rise this July was to be the first instalment of the 14%, the second coming in 2015.

I believe that Local Government Minister Phil Hogan and the Fine Gael and Labour councillors have colluded in a cynical exercise in deception.

Were these cuts and rent rises ever really going to take place? Were they put up to be shot down? Or was it a case of the cuts and rent rises being pushed by Hogan but then withdrawn to try to save the skins of Fine Gael and Labour councillors in Dublin?

Either way, it is a damning indictment of this Government and their party colleagues in Dublin City Council.

The Sinn Féin councillors did not go along with this charade. We agreed the amendments to delete the rent rises and the cuts to homeless services and to housing grants. But we opposed the overall budget, a budget that provides for Irish Water and the Local Property Tax and that falls far short of what is required for decent services for our city, especially housing services.

This budget was not about saving the citizens of Dublin or about standing up to the Government – it was an attempt to save Labour seats in the local elections, while still maintaining the austerity policies of the Government and leaving unchallenged the scandals of the Local Property Tax and Irish Water.