Simon Harris

-----over €1,000 per winter, with one in four households qualifying, including those on working family payments. VAT on gas and electricity has been cut to 9%.

Three hundred thousand people can access free HRT.

There are increased weekly payments for pensioners, carers and people with disabilities.

The minimum wage is up 40% since 2020 to make sure work pays. Back to school allowance has been expanded to preschool children. There has been the largest ever increase in child support payments. More than 55,000 families with children in third level pay no contribution fee at all, and that number is growing. Auto-enrolment has been introduced, supporting 763,000 workers to build retirement securi…

Ceann Comhairle, when the noise stops-----

The energy price shock does also highlight the importance of reducing our dependence on imported fossil fuels and accelerating the climate transition. As long as we remain, in this country, dependent on fossil fuels from imports we risk our economic security and well-being. We are implementing the largest infrastructure programme in the history of the State and capital investment is projected to …

-----across SEAI schemes because the Government has made it more attractive and more financially possible than ever before for households to upgrade their homes. We are seeing applications for heat pumps surge by 95%, roof insulation by 81% and cavity wall insulation by 62%.

We are accelerating delivery-----

-----particularly for those most in need, while continuing to support tens of thousands of Irish homeowners with upgrades. We are also delivering at scale for the most vulnerable, with over 8,100 homes completed last year under the warmer homes scheme, which is the highest number ever. There is always more to do and challenges will always come but in a time of enormous and rapid change, the one c…

We have provided financial and other supports to households and businesses in a range of ways. We have deployed the State's balance sheet to maintain jobs, livelihoods and incomes. Each challenge the world has thrown at us we have emerged stronger from, despite it. The strength of the Irish economy is clearly evident in our labour market. Unemployment has remained below 5% for 16 consecutive quart…

Today it stands at 62%. That reduction did not happen by accident. It happened because successive Governments, including this one, have run structural primary surpluses, have treated windfall corporate tax receipts as temporary rather than permanent revenue and have made deliberate decisions to sterilise those receipts into long-term saving funds. Our positive fiscal position-----

-----has given us the ability to respond to the energy price shock and other countries and other executives, including in Northern Ireland, have not been in a position to respond similarly.

We benefit from having acted-----

-----to address the structural challenges that lay on the horizon.

To enhance our economic resilience we have established two long-term saving funds, the Future Ireland Fund and the Infrastructure, Climate and Nature Fund.

We now have the fiscal power to respond to external shocks. That was not always guaranteed. The external environment that we face is clouded in considerable uncertainty. Whatever the developments are in the Middle East over the coming days, the economic fallout of the conflict is likely to persist given the lasting a real damage to energy infrastructure. As a result, the supply-demand imbalance in…

No thought is ever given to how it would fund its endless commitments.

For a week, the airwaves were filled by those who shout the loudest and command the most attention online.

In an age shaped by social media algorithms-----

-----and 24-hour news cycles, it is easy to mistake that volume for consensus.

People feel real pressures but no one in this republic gets to restrict the right of anyone else to move or go about their business.

Beneath the noise, we have the cancer patients who could not get to their chemotherapy-----

We had the expectant mothers who did not get to their check-ups-----

We had the man who did not get to his dialysis appointment.

We had the worker who lost a day’s pay because they could not get to their job.