Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael)

That is largely the point I was going to make. I am not unsympathetic to the important issues Deputy Gould raises. I see them in my own constituency. I deal with people like that every day in my role as a public representative in Wicklow and a Member of this House since 2011. That is why we took a number of measures to address child poverty and working family poverty in the budget. I will not have time to outline them and it would not be relevant to this amendment to do so but we took a number of decisions in respect of the working family payment, payments in relation to children and increases to social welfare. We made sure that all of the new expenditure measures in the budget were progressive. As the Deputy would acknowledge, we also did not bring forward additional legislative measures in this Finance Bill for some of the reasons he has mentioned such as the pressures that other workers in our economy are other. I will make any future considerations in relation to the SFT in the context of future annual budgets.

See this speech in context