Louise O'Reilly (Dublin Fingal West, Sinn Fein)

As the Minister indicated, he will not be accepting this amendment or any of the others but we will chat about them anyway.

The purpose of the amendment is to give people some autonomy over their own money in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis. There would have been a time when I would have wholeheartedly agreed with the Minister but to be brutally frank with him, he talks about the underlying objectives of the scheme and people have an underlying objective to be able to get to the end of the week and to be able to afford to feed themselves and all the rest of it and that is not the case for far too many of them in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis. When the opportunity to revisit this exists, it is the position of Sinn Féin that people should be given the choice to have that autonomy over their own money. That was the purpose of this amendment.