Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The Minister can dress this up all he wants. We have been at him for months now about the cost-of-living crisis. We have put forward proposal after proposal but he has ignored them all. He will ignore them all until he is forced into a U-turn, just as he has been with regard to the windfall tax and decoupling, when he sees the light that the measures that we on our benches have put forward make sense.

The Minister cannot escape the reality that he is the finance minister who has the worst record in Europe according to the Financial Timesand Bruegel on supporting households and businesses during the energy crisis. This is according to GDP. If we use GNI*, the Minister is still at the bottom of the class. He is that finance minister. We have the ability to support people. I will put a proposal to the Minister. This is a measure that is being taken across Europe. In the past 48 or 72 hours, the Dutch and the Danes have announced they will bring in a form of price certainty in electricity prices for their citizens. They are doing this for their citizens, just as France, Poland and Austria have done it. Why will the Minister for Finance not give the same certainty to people who are so afraid of those bills landing through their letterboxes this winter?

See this speech in context