Mairead Farrell (Galway West, Sinn Fein)
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I apologise. My laptop decided to die and restart but here I am. All the questions I wanted to ask have been raised. We are seeing a rise in the cost of living with increasing inflation and that is affecting lower-income households in particular. In our alternative budget we suggested a €10 increase in working age payments, and that must be done urgently. Sometimes there is a policy that tries to help lower middle-income earners.

It actually ends up also helping those higher earners. Specifically, we can see that when we are trying to target the middle income group. Have the witnesses any policy suggestions on how we could tackle that whole issue of the middle income group? That is not to take away from the lower income group; I do not mean it that way, but sometimes we can be more targeted in that sense. The issue with the middle income group is how to target that group and assist them without actually in turn also assisting those on higher incomes.