Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Ireland has welcomed a lot of people - approximately 100,000 - from Ukraine in the past two years. I am proud that we as a country were able to do that, notwithstanding the pressures and problems it has created. The numbers are big but we are not top of the league table in the EU, either on raw numbers or in percentage terms. There are much higher numbers in countries like Poland, Slovakia and so on, for obvious reasons. It would not work to have a single uniform payment rate across the EU for the exact same reasons we do not have a single minimum wage across the EU. The cost of living in Bulgaria, for example, is very different from the cost of living in Denmark. We have to set rates that make sense for this country.

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