Analysis indicates Government’s first Budget will fail to generate growth and jobs while disproportionately hitting low-income groups
Independent think-tank TASC today issued its response to Budget 2012.  Entitled ‘Roadmap to Greater Inequality’, TASC’s analysis indicates that the measures in this week’s Budget will fail to generate growth and jobs, and will disproportionately impact on low-income groups.
Speaking this [...]

It didn’t take long.  Patrick Nulty, TD voted against the budget on Tuesday night.  Suddenly, on Thursday morning an op-ed appears in the Irish Times attacking the young TD.  And not just ‘attacking’ - it is one of the most vicious attacks on an individual TD you’ll read on an issue of policy.  After all, Nulty [...]

Act two of the budget:  increased taxation on capital and property amounts to a quarter of the cuts in social protection alone (never mind education and health).  That takes €15 million off those holding on to legacy property tax reliefs (out of a total of €435 million they gain in relief).  Lone parents are going [...]

As we are forced to look at the budget over two days, a particular unnecessary cruelty, it’s worth emphasising, as those in the ULA and Sinn Fein have done, that this is a budget based on political choices. It is depressing to watch seasoned politicans like Pat Rabbitte claim pathetically that if they didn’t make [...]

When we move from the numbers in the budget papers out into the real world we find that Child Benefit and child income support has been cut again - not only for larger families but for all families.  The instrument for this cut is that most effective stealth tax of all:  [...]

Despite the Taoiseach’s 17 references to jobs in his national address last night, the budget presented this afternoon will cut out between 15,000 and 20,000 jobs from the economy next year.  In other words, there would be between 15,000 and 20,000 more people at work next year were it not for the budgetary measures announced [...]

On December 3rd, 2011, the Spectacle of Defiance and Hope came out on the streets of Dublin to protest the devastation of the community sector. People brought their books of grievances and hopes just as what happened before the French Revolution.

The Taoiseach is to speak to the nation - on Sunday evening, when we will all be huddled around televisions, radios and computers.  In the spirit of being helpful, the Taoiseach - and his speech writers - could do worse than read President Franklin Roosevelt’s fireside addresses to the American people.  I reproduce an abridged [...]

The vote yesterday to extend the bank guarantee for another year, combined with the reassuring statement from Michael Noonan that its impossible to forecast when the bank guarantee scheme will end, confirms Jim Stewart’s prognosis that the main problem in the EU at the moment is:
“…the prevailing consensus (held for example by the President of the [...]

According to the CSO, there is a growing number of people experiencing deprivation (read here and here for a full discussion of this on Progressive-Economy). In fact, nearly one-in-four of the population suffer two or more instances of deprivation. But that doesn’t stop our man, Minister Leo Varadkar, from assuring all those folk that, hey, the budget [...]