SVP offers ‘broad welcome’ for increases in Budget 2017

The Society of St Vincent de Paul (SVP) has “broadly welcomed” Budget 2017 for its efforts in the areas of social housing and early childhood care and education, but the Disability Federation has described its measures as “utterly failing disabled people”.

Speaking to The Irish Catholic after the Minister for Finance commended the Budget to the House on Tuesday, John Paul McCafferty, Head of Social Justice with the SVP said “the commitment to an ambitious social housing programme and early childhood care were very important to us, so we welcome the improvements there.”

Speech

In his Budget speech, Minister for Finance Michael Noonan announced a range of measures on homelessness and home ownership, specifically a help to buy scheme together with schemes to boost the rental sector. Meanwhile, Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform Paschal Donohue announced the allocation of a further €86 million to the Early Childhood Care and Education Scheme, and an increase of €5 weekly in all social welfare payments from March.

Drive

Mr McCafferty said the Budget’s drive on homelessness, coupled with the already existing Rebuilding Ireland scheme to build thousands of social housing units has the potential to “make a difference to those we deal with in hotels and B&Bs, those in damp and cold rental units”. Likewise, he said, SVP “welcomes what is the first increase in social welfare levels in about eight years”.

However, Mr McCafferty cautioned that only “sustained commitment” in all of these areas would make a real difference in the long term and said Budget 2017 should be “the beginning of a solid base on which we can build into the future”.

Meanwhile, the Irish Church’s aid agency Trócaire has said that although “we welcome the €10million increase after years of cuts to the overseas aid budget”, in real terms the funds stood as a decrease of approximately 1% on earlier years.

Speaking to The Irish Catholic, Eoghan Rice of Trócaire said the effect of a cautionary Budget in the area of overseas aid mean that “it looks like it will leave us further from the universal and hoped for 0.7% of GDP commitment” to the developing world.