Micheál Martin (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I join in the welcome to members of Gaelscoil Bharra chuig Tithe an Oireachtais. Tá súil agam go mbainfidh siad taitneamh as a lá anseo.

There is no question the war on Ukraine has very significantly exacerbated what was an emerging inflationary cycle coming from the pandemic, the fact that economies rebounded so quickly from the pandemic and the resulting supply and demand issues. That has created significant pressures on families and households. The Government responded and has done so quickly, more quickly than other countries across Europe. In particular, the Government introduced very significant measures in hiking up the fuel allowance to more than €1,139, which is a 55% increase in the free fuel allowance alone. We reduced the excise duty on petrol, diesel and green diesel and we also reduced VAT from 13.5% to 9% on gas and electricity. We gave €200 to every single household throughout the country. We cut the annual public service obligation levy from €52 to minus €75. We launched the national retrofitting scheme. We also put a cap on school transport fees for families. We cut public transport fares by 20%, with an additional 50% cut in fares for young people. We lowered the threshold for the drug payment scheme to €80 per month, which benefits more than 70,000 families. We brought forward a working family payment budget increase. We abolished the €80 inpatient hospital charge for children and so on. We brought in specific schemes for the haulage, tillage and hospitality sectors.

The bottom line is more than €2.4 billion has already been spent on cost-of-living measures. We are asking nobody to wait six months. We are saying we cannot chase inflation every month. The World Bank is warning of the risk of stagflation, which is the kind of thing we experienced in the 1970s. Whereas 1970s' stagflation was caused by the initial oil price shock, it was the second and third rounds of inflation that drove it on for the next ten years. I do not want that to happen in Ireland over the next ten years. The wider economy in Ireland is still growing. We need to protect our economic growth as long as we possibly can. We need to protect all those people who are in jobs - the 2.5 million people who are working. We cannot take risks with the economy or with inflation.

That idea of protecting the jobs in the economy is something to which the Deputy should give more attention. If we had followed Sinn Féin's advice from the outset, I think we would be in an even greater inflationary cycle. The ESRI report is a good reminder of that in terms of the importance of targeting and not just making wholesale cuts across the board, which Sinn Féin has advocated time and time again as it would damage the economy. I do not think that it gets the enterprise side of the economy or wants to get it. In my view, we have to watch that side of it and we have to avoid stagflation in itself.

We have taken action and we are going to take more action to alleviate pressures on people and households. I am worried about the winter period because we have seen what Putin did this week in reducing gas supplies to Germany and other European customers. That is going to have an impact on our energy situation. He is leveraging it in particular to create maximum pressure for the winter period. We have to allocate our resources in the optimal way, which in my view is to protect people right throughout the winter period and beyond the winter. That is the big objective that we should share, namely-----

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