Cathal Crowe (Clare, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to speak on the Bill, which gives effect to the measures announced on budget day back in September. What a good budget that was. It had €4 billion of measures to address the cost-of-living pressures people are facing, and €900 million was allocated to permanent increases in social welfare payments. There were a lot of really good things. I know the double payment of children's allowance has helped many people in recent weeks. There were huge increases in the social welfare budget this time around. We saw more people qualifying for the working family payment and the qualified child allowance and the fuel allowance were also increased, as were payments for carers and people on community employment schemes. There are an awful lot of positives.

I ask that some fluidity be built into this. Normally, hardships were felt by the people of this country in the winter months but it is about the economic outlook globally, not just the Irish economic outlook, as Sinn Féin might try to tell us, day in, day out, on the airwaves. The global economic outlook is rather shaky from February of next year onwards. We are in a state of stagnation at the moment but the global outlook changes in the early spring period. With that, there has to be an in-built fluidity to all of this, just like there was throughout the Covid pandemic, so social welfare can be reactionary to the state of the nation at the time and the hardships that people are facing.

That is why we have gone into government - to look after the people who are struggling most in this country. Sinn Féin Members can laugh all they want but they want to decrease the pension age.

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