Will Budget 2025 make a real impact on people’s lives? The Irish Times spoke to a renter, a pensioner, a teacher, a landlord, a farmer and others to get their assessment on how the budget will affect them.
Teacher: ‘I don’t feel any closer to being able to afford my own home’
When Aisling Hughes calculated how much more money she would have in her pocket after Tuesday’s budget, she couldn’t help feeling deflated.
“It’s a total of €904,” the teacher (28) says. “It’s okay, but I feel a bit disheartened and confused. I work long hours and pay a lot of tax. We’ve a windfall tax from Apple and a huge surplus. Where is it all going?”
Hughes, who teaches home economics and religion at Our Lady’s Secondary School, Castleblaney, Co Monaghan, rents a house with her mother.
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She would like to own her own home but says she is unable to save anything close to what is needed to convince a bank to lend her a mortgage.
She estimates her annual earnings are about €55,000 a year, on a salary scale that ranges from about €44,000 to €80,000 over a teaching career.
While she has benefited from some cost-of-living measures, she feels none of it is enough to make any significant difference to her dreams of home ownership.
The Help-to-Buy scheme, she says, is tied up in red tape and does not benefit someone in her situation.
While rent tax credits may help in the meantime, they are relatively small. Hughes says most months she feels lucky if she can put a couple of hundred euro away in the bank
“Why is it in Germany that single people have access to social housing, yet here we’re on the bottom rung of the ladder?”
She also looks around at her teaching colleagues and sees families struggling to make ends meet. “Many are forced into working to do grinds in the evenings or marking scripts for the State exams,” she says.
In education terms, she is encouraged that free schoolbooks have been extended to senior-cycle students. “I’m delighted to see that. It’s an extortionate cost,” she says.
Similarly, she is encouraged to see more funding going into hiring special needs assistants and special education teachers.
However, she sees first-hand how students with more severe or moderate disabilities are shoehorned into a mainstream system that cannot always meet their needs. “We have no special school – the nearest one is about an hour away,” she says.
She says although child benefit and other welfare supports will support many families, they will not benefit single people.
“There’s not much for the squeezed middle. We tend not to qualify for much but pay for almost everything,” she says.
Renter: ‘They could have done a lot more to be transformative’
It “looks like a budget that’s trying to get more votes more than anything else,” says Ross Boyd (25) from Blanchardstown, Co Dublin.
Certain measures announced on Tuesday sound pleasing to the ear, but he remains unsure how some of them will affect his daily life.
Although the rent tax credit increase to €1,000 will help renters “a little bit”, Boyd describes it as a “Band-Aid” measure, saying the €250 increase would “barely” match rent increases seen in recent years.
“It’s sort of a laissez-faire approach,” he says, adding that rental prices should be “controlled” to make long-lasting change for renters, rather than subsidising rent in the short term.
Noting his rent is €900 per month for a student bed near University College Cork (UCC), he describes the increase as “the smallest party popper” going off for renters across the country.
Boyd, who has autism, welcomes the October bonus double payment to his disability allowance, saying the measure will help with the cost of living “in the immediate term”.
Groceries and utilities bring his monthly expenses to about €1,200, which he funds primarily through his disability allowance, topping it up with his savings.
“Having that extra bit of money will make a difference,” he says, adding it will provide a “bit more comfort”, though he believes he should not have to rely on special payments for his daily living costs.
Although any increase is welcome, he says the €12 increase to welfare payments, which includes his disability allowance, is “paltry” and will undoubtedly be “eaten up” by inflation.
Boyd, a postgraduate student at UCC, believes third-level fee cuts should have been extended to postgraduate students, especially “when you look at the fact that you almost need a master’s to get a job in Ireland”. While welcoming the €1,000 increase in support for postgrads, he notes this is only available to those in receipt of Susi grants.
Overall, “I think they could have done a lot more to actually be transformative, it feels more ‘steady on’ and making sure that some people feel it in their pockets,” he says.
Pensioner: ‘If they think for one minute this budget will get my vote. They will not’
Teresa O’Callaghan (66), who lives alone just outside Claremorris, Co Mayo, has “mixed feelings” about how the budget affects her.
The pensioner had hoped for an increase in the State pension, more help with fuel costs, better public transport in rural areas and greater investment in the health service.
She will see her pension increase by €12 a week, to €278, and will receive two double-payments of this – in October and December. While her €22-a-week living-alone allowance is not increasing, she will get a once-off €200 as she is in receipt of the allowance, and a once-off €300 payment as she gets the €33 a week fuel allowance.
She will also get a €250 energy credit applied to her electricity bills in two tranches – one before Christmas and one after.
“These are welcome but I would have liked a bigger increase in the pension and a weekly increase of maybe €10 a week in the living-alone allowance instead of the lump sum. Once you spend the €200 it’s gone but an increase in the payment, you’d feel you’re getting more money.”
She feels similarly about the fuel allowance, saying she would have preferred an increase in the weekly payment, elongating its impact. “It’s going to be a long, hard winter.”
O’Callaghan was a full-time carer for her late husband, Charles, until his death some years ago, and she finds life “kind of lonely” now.
The charity Alone, she says, is a “lifeline”. She gets a call most days from the charity, providing contact and support.
“The cost of living, it was all right before my husband died. We had his pension and I got the carer’s allowance. But now, on my own, it is a struggle. I still have to pay the same bills.
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“Coming into the winter I am worried. I wake up now very cold – my feet and fingers are a lot colder. An increase in the fuel allowance is very important. If you haven’t a warm body, how can you function?”
As she continues speaking, she becomes more upset. “They said it was going to be a giveaway budget. It isn’t a giveaway by any means. What we were looking for, what we understood we’d get, it’s not. It’s a load of rubbish. If they think for one minute this budget will get my vote. They will not.”
Landlord: ‘It is wholly inadequate in helping current landlords to meet rising operational costs’
The Government had a chance to “do something to keep landlords in the system and they didn’t,” says Mary Conway, a landlord of 28 years and chairwoman of the Irish Property Owners’ Association (IPOA).
“Nothing” announced in Tuesday’s budget will help her as a property owner, she says.
Conway, who has significantly reduced the number of properties she owns and is in the process of leaving the market entirely, says Budget 2025 offers “little hope at a time when countless landlords are leaving the sector, as they struggle to make mortgage repayments”.
Alongside extended mortgage interest relief, pre-letting expenses relief for landlords is being extended to the end of 2027 under Budget 2025.
She said for landlords to qualify for pre-letting expenses, however, the premises must be vacant for six months.
“Who can afford to leave something empty for six months if you have mortgage repayments?” she asks, adding the €10,000 cap is “very, very little” to refurbish an apartment or house.
“It is wholly inadequate in helping current landlords to meet rising operational costs. This will have no discernible impact on the retention of existing rental stock,” she says.
She believes targeted measures that might help, such as further increases in tax breaks, could be seen as “politically incorrect”.
Wheelchair user: ‘The €12 increase [in disability allowance] is not enough. It will barely buy a bale of briquettes’
Michelle O’Shea (49), a wheelchair user with mild cerebral palsy, says the €12 increase in her weekly disability allowance “would barely buy a bale of briquettes and a loaf of bread” though she welcomed a number of lump-sum payments, totalling €644 between now and Christmas.
Although these payments will help, she is “very disappointed” her weekly payment, currently €232 a week, didn’t go up by a little more.
“For a person that is unemployed and disabled, it really isn’t enough. I’d have liked it to go up maybe by €15.”
O’Shea lives with her mother, Marian O’Shea (85), in the family home in Golden, Co Tipperary.
Following the budget, her weekly income will be €244.
Her mother’s payment will increase to €298 a week plus two double payments of this amount. The fuel allowance her mother gets – paid between September and April at €33 a week – is not increasing but she will also get a lump sum in respect of this, of €300. In addition, the household will receive €250 energy credit, in two payments – one this year and one early in 2025.
O’Shea’s biggest worries are the cost of groceries and heating.
“When I go shopping in Lidl or Aldi or Dunnes Stores, I have to budget carefully each week. I have to go for the cheap items – lots of beans and rice.
“I am a wheelchair user and I need heat all the time. If I don’t keep warm, I have bad circulation and my fingers go blue in the cold. I have to wear blankets over my legs. The €12 increase is not enough. It will barely buy a bale of briquettes – that’s €9 – and what do I get after? Nothing. Maybe a loaf of bread in Lidl or Aldi.
“When I think of all the money they spent on the [Leinster House] bike shed I feel very let down.”
She is also disappointed not to see more investment in rural transport. “I live in the country and there is no bus passing my door with wheelchair-access. It was an uphill struggle all the time for disabled people before the budget and it will still be.”
Small business owner: ‘If people can’t cut corners in costs, they will have to put up their prices’
Cafe owner Eimear Killian says it feels like there are very few benefits for small businesses in Budget 2025.
“You are just small fry. It just feels like we don’t matter in the big scheme of things,” says the co-owner of Builín Blasta Café & Bakery in Spiddal, Co Galway.
She says the customer will ultimately feel the effect. “If people can’t cut corners in costs they will have to put up their prices.”
The budget left VAT for hospitality at 13.5 per cent despite the hospitality sector campaigning for a reduction to 9 per cent.
She says the lack of measures for small businesses will impact smaller towns and villages more than cities. “Because places will pop up again in the cities, one will replace the other. In more rural areas, it will have more of an impact”.
Fixed business expenses such as electricity and water will be ongoing costs until it comes time to sign a new contract, Killian says. While she will negotiate with other suppliers, “you don’t always get as much as you want, and sometimes you get nothing.”
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Small businesses will be facing a rise in business costs next year as it was announced the minimum wage would rise by 80 cent to €13.50 from January 1st next year.
Business owners such as Killian will now need to review everything “to see where the money is going to come from” for costs such as wages and PRSI.
“We just have to reflect ourselves, look at the budget and see where we go.”
Farmer: ‘It’s all tokenism. It’s moving the deckchairs on the Titanic’
William Cassidy’s farm is profitable, his land is good and farming is a real vocation for him, but he believes the budget offers nothing to farmers who are suffering from income volatility and escalating costs.
He is not alone. According to the Irish Farmers’ Association (IFA), farm costs have gone up by 73 per cent since 2017.
Cassidy, who milks 110 cows on his family farm outside Athy, Co Kildare, went into dairying full-time in 2018. Before that his farm was mixed with tillage, sucklers and sheep.
The Minister for Agriculture, Charlie McConalogue, has announced a series of measures to buttress farm incomes with an additional €25 per calf (going from €50 to €75 an animal) in the National Beef Welfare Scheme which is aimed at suckler farms and a doubling in the payments from €20 to €40 per calf through the dairy beef scheme, which is for dairy farmers involved in producing calves for beef production.
Neither is enough, Cassidy believes, to compensate farmers for the costs that have escalated in recent years.
“It’s all tokenism. There’s no bigger picture in it. It’s moving the deckchairs on the Titanic. There’s no plan in it. It’s all about pleasing a load of people. None of this is going to bring anybody new into farming.”
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He says many farmers are pulling out of environmental schemes such as the Agri-Climate Rural Environment Scheme because of the bureaucracy involved.
The most eye-catching measure in the budget from the perspective of farmers is the increase in the threshold for capital acquisitions tax (CAT) from €325,000 to €400,000 for a farmer passing on his or her farm to a child. With agricultural relief on 90 per cent of the value of the farm, it means the threshold for any tax to come in rises from €3.25 million to €4 million.
However, Cassidy says this increase does not take account of the skyrocketing value of land with prices rising by 31 per cent across the State between 2020 and 2023.
“Around our neck of the woods, land has gone up from €15,000 an acre to €25,000 an acre so that doesn’t even keep up with that,” he says.
He has welcomed Government intervention to stop non-farmers buying up land for tax planning purposes.
However, he says: “I don’t see anything in this budget that will make young people want to go into [farming]”.
Creche owner: ‘I think people in the sector will wonder what they are getting out of this budget’
Rachel Prouse, who runs Missus Tatty’s creche in Clonee, Co Meath, said although there were welcome announcements of extra funding in the budget, they will take time to come into effect, with uncertainty in the meantime over who will receive what.
“Anything they give us helps but I’m sceptical about how much of the extra funding announced in this budget I’ll see in my business,” she says.
The biggest thing she had wanted to see introduced was an increased contribution towards the wages of childcare workers. Minister for Children Roderic O’Gorman said there would be an additional €15 million allocated to help with the cost of wages.
“That is welcome,” she says, but the minimum wage has also gone up. “As awful as it is for the public when creches have to increase prices, everything is going up, and we have to cover staff’s wages,” she says.
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O’Gorman said there will be a €35 million, or 6 per cent, increase to core funding, the support provided directly to providers to help with costs but again, says Prouse, the devil will be in the detail.
“I don’t know what I’ll get of that,” she says. “My fear would be they’ll divide it up in a way that means services like mine don’t end up really getting the benefit. They allowed us to apply for fee increases recently but you’d want to see the hoops you had to go through to justify it and I think this might end up being something similar.”
Prouse’s service received about €180,000 in core funding last year and still returned a loss of more than €50,000 for the year.
She would, she says, have liked to have seen a different approach taken with an emphasis on supporting wage costs.
“If they simply paid half of wage costs it would make the administration side of things easier and less costly for us and for them. It could be administered with Revenue to ensure people did it properly. As it is, I think people in the sector will wonder what they are getting out of this budget.”
* Interviews with Carl O’Brien, Kitty Holland, Jack White, Ronan McGreevy, Fiona Reddan, Emmet Malone and Jade Wilson
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