Paul McAuliffe (Dublin North West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I happy to take the time if the Deputy does not arrive.

This weekend, Fianna Fáil will hold its Ard-Fheis. There will be thousands of members from across the country who will be coming to the Ard-Fheis for the first time since we entered Government. Many of them can be proud of the budget that we have presented to this House. There are many shared goals with our coalition partners, but I can see Fianna Fáil's fingerprints all over this budget. I can also see the values that many of those members of the party have in the detail of the budget. Despite the Opposition trying to present it as a collection of bankers and developers being at the Ard-Fheis, those involved will be people from every community. It is those people who will benefit from this budget. There will be families with young children who will be paying less in childcare. There will be families with children in primary school who will be paying less because they will have free schoolbooks. There will be families with students who will be paying less because of the reduction in student contribution fees. There will be people who need the State's support who will get one of the largest increases in social welfare, including targeted supports. All of those communities right across Ireland, including older people who will have additional access to the fuel allowance and, importantly, the better energy warmer homes scheme, which will allow them to insulate their homes for free, will benefit from this budget.

They will come to the Ard-Fheis this weekend with higher energy bills. In order to resolve that, we have put in place a sustainable, affordable, costed, implementable way of tackling the energy crisis. It will not negate all of the increases that Putin has imposed on the people of Europe and I look forward to seeing the European co-ordinated approach on a windfall tax because that will help fund us.

This Government has managed the economy in a way that we can make an €11 billion intervention without borrowing. That is significant. We do not want to create €11 billion to put into our back pocket. We want to distribute it, support people and tackle some of the issues that have been as problems for more than a decade, particularly those in the area of women's healthcare. We now have free contraception for all women under 30. We will have zero VAT on period products and zero VAT on hormone replacement therapy, HRT, and a new publicly funded IVF model.

These are the many interventions that people have talked about for some time and that had not been addressed but that have now been addressed by this Government. We can vote for the resources in the budget, but the challenge will be for us to actually implement them. In this budget there is more money for people with special needs and more money for SNAs, with provision for more than 20,000 SNAs. The secret and the job of government is to implement such resources. We have managed the economy, protected families, protected incomes and ensured that jobs stay in place. Now we have to get on with the job of delivering these programmes in order that people can benefit from them.

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