Tom Barry (Cork East, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Rural Ireland will also benefit from this budget. Stimulus such as income averaging for farms for three to five years is significant and is also available to farmers who derive off-farm income from on-farm activities or diversification. We aim for an employment figure of 2 million and this will help significantly.

People who seek to criticise a stimulus that will help people buy houses are scraping the bottom of the barrel. One improvement I would seek in regard to this measure is for the discussion to be moved further in terms of the definition of a first-time buyer. In many situations people buy a house jointly initially and then singly. We need to discuss this issue because many elderly men and women are on their own and find they need to buy a house later on in life. We should try to help these people also.

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