Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

Has the Department of the Taoiseach or any other part of the Government recalculated revised estimates of the economic impact of the greater devaluation of sterling in terms of the budget and of planning in regard to the capital programme, given all of these will be greatly impacted?

As I go around talking to people, I speak to many in the retail trade who have complex import-export arrangements in regard to buying their products from Britain and who cannot instantly source them from France. I am talking about retail companies that are in business a very long time, in particular small-scale businesses. No information of any kind is available from the Government to help or guide them. These are people in business a long time who work hard but the Government has made no information available to that kind of traditional business. If the Taoiseach takes a walk around Dublin, he will come across those kinds of shops in any ten-minute walk.

When I asked the Taoiseach a couple of weeks ago, he was highly confident Mr. Barnier was going to have a very high level Irish person in his cabinet. The way the Taoiseach spoke, it appeared he was going to announce the name of that person and that he was to be part of that cabinet almost immediately. Weeks have passed since the Taoiseach promised that and we have heard absolutely zilch.

See this speech in context