Mary Lou McDonald (Dublin Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

There has been a difference of view about whether or not there is an emergency. I am in no doubt there is still an emergency and it is felt in households across the land. They are in no doubt that it is still an emergency to get the rent together, pay the mortgage, put a coat on the child’s back or get schoolbooks. That is the stuff of emergency. In that light, the intention of the amendments was to place the focus where it properly belongs, on workers and incomes under the threshold of €65,000 and to make sure that people elected here, who should lead by example, members of the Government who are the most recent authors of austerity and past officeholders who brought about the calamity in the first instance, should certainly not be the beneficiaries of the Minister’s orderly unwinding of the financial emergency measures in the public interest.

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