The budget will be held on 6 October, Tánaiste and Minister for Finance Simon Harris has confirmed.
Speaking on RTÉ’s Today with David McCullagh, the Tánaiste said the Summer Economic Statement will be published tomorrow, an annual document he said is “pivotal” to outlining what financial structures the budget must work within this October.
Mr Harris said the statement will include space for roughly €7bn in additional spending, while the additional tax package still needs to be negotiated internally by Government.
However, he stressed that he wants to prioritise personal income tax changes, saying he has made “no secret of the fact” he wants to adapt the existing system, referencing the entry point for when people begin to pay the highest rate of tax.
Minister Harris said he did not enter politics for the benefit of rich households, but that many people who are working hard and getting up early to do so are not currently seeing enough benefit from their pay cheques.
The priority in the budget must be to reward work, he said.
The Tánaiste said there is a fair tax and good social welfare system but some people do not qualify for any supports and this must be balanced.
Mr Harris added that carers work extremely hard and this is why major changes in relation to the means testing have been put in place.
“I very much see this budget as a kind of a direction of budget and setting out the direction of travel that we intend to take. And personal income tax has to be part of that.”
Mr Harris said the Irish economy is very exposed in terms of the global economic outlook and this is why the Government needs to continue to run budget surpluses.
Govt ‘walked away from social partnership’ – SIPTU
Meanwhile, Alex Kane of SIPTU has said that taxation stopped being linked to social partnership in 2009 when the Government “walked away from social partnership” and he said that the Fine Gael side of the Government had opted to look after people in hospitality rather than index link the tax balance.
He said that pay increases could not be bargained off for concessions on hybrid working.
“I would make this point in terms of where we find ourselves with hybrid working,” he said, speaking on RTÉ’s Drivetime.
“35.4%, that’s a million workers in this state, across the public sector and the private sector, now work in some sort of hybrid arrangement.
“I’m the incoming deputy general secretary for the public service. For the previous four years, I represented workers mostly in the private sector. And not once, not once, have I come across a pay deal that was linked to a reduction in hybrid working or the availability of hybrid working.
“But my experience has been that some employers equated presenteeism with efficiency. And I think that’s a fundamental flaw in the way of looking at this.”
Mr Kane said that the value of remote working must be seen in the context of the digital revolution and that work patterns have changed.
“It’s important to have that evidence-based discussion. And even a study that IBEC did found that 68% of employees said that their well-being was improved by virtue of the fact that they had hybrid working,” he said.
“If anybody’s stuck on that M50 going home this evening and would have had the opportunity to be more productive at home, that’s where they want to be. And any employer that has anything between their ears, that’s where they want them to be as well.
“This is one element of technology that so happens to benefit workers. And lo and behold, then we have employers that say ‘No, you can’t have that’. There is certainly an unfair divvy out of the benefits of technology.
“I would argue it suits employers. It suits improving productivity. And again, that there are studies from Stanford and other universities to support that.”
