As usual for our Schrödinger’s Government, the lead-up to this budget had many a Minister crying out that there wasn’t enough to go around to do what they wanted. But it appears Minister for Public Expenditure Jack Chambers has a pocketful of orange peels, and austerity-lite is back on the menu. Here’s a run-through of the key measures affecting tenants, artists, and people on low incomes:
The Good
- €10 increase for weekly social welfare payments, including Jobseekers’ Allowance.
- €34.4 million to fund a full year of income support for artists, likely through the now-permanent Basic Income for Artists Scheme, which will begin supporting 2,000 participants in late 2026.
- €4 million in funding for the League of Ireland’s football academies. We can’t fund the whole sport through virtue-signalling commemorative jersey sales, unfortunately.
- Funding for community-based mental health services to add 33,000 more hours of free counselling, targeted at men, young people, and LGBTQ+ people. A needed but insufficient intervention– nearly 15 years after austerity, suicide persists as the top cause of death for Irish men under 25.
- The rent tax credit has increased by €150. Hurrah! That’s worth almost three whole euros a week!
The Bad
- The price of a pack of cigarettes will go up by €1 from midnight. This pushes Vogue Essence Bleue over the €20 mark. Disposable vapes and liquid will increase on a sliding scale, with the average disposable increasing by 40¢.
- The Rent-A-Room scheme has increased the tax-free rent allowance for digs landlords from €14,000 to €16,000. Expect this to drive up the cost of licensee room rentals to well over €1,000, a trend already common in areas around college campuses. No change to protections for Rent-A-Room tenants, who remain outside the bounds of the RTB.
- Help-to-Buy scheme applicants can now claim up to €35,000 in back taxes to fund a new-build first home purchase. If there’s any one theme to this mish-mash budget, it’s driving up prices for regular people– and if past data on the H-T-B’s inflationary effect on the housing market is anything to go off, we can expect this to do little more than increase asking prices by €5,000.
- A new Public Spending Efficiency Taskforce has been set up. I assume this is to attempt to combat the ill-will brought on by the bike shed controversy, but it reads to me more like a weird knock-off of Elon Musk’s failed DOGE experiment.
The Ugly
- Minimum wage increases from €14.15 to €14.94. Previously, the Government had committed to bringing the minimum wage in line with the living wage by 2029, but Super Junior Minister Emer Higgins evaded a question on the likelihood of this on RTE’s The Week in Politics on Saturday. In 2026, the living wage is €16.00 per hour.
- The government announced a €150 permanent reduction in college fees, bringing them down to €2350. This is a €350 increase from the 2022-23 and 2023-24 academic years, when FF/FG reduced fees by €1,000 as a cost-of-living measure. Well timed, of course, before the 2024 General Election.
- The much-anticipated Cost of Disability payment is a €500 lump sum while the Government designs a “better” system for 2028. Coming in at under a tenner a week, it is at least better than last year’s budget which cut the payment completely. Similar to student fee reductions leading into the election, a pilot of this payment was introduced at €400 in Budget 2024.
As disappointing as this all is, the Minister for Finance has reassured us that this is just the beginning of a “four-year plan,” and judgement should be reserved until then. So while we bide our time until the 2028 pre-election giveaways, I will be taking my extra tenner for the week straight to the pub.
