Dee Ryan (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State to the Chamber. I echo the sentiments that were so eloquently delivered by my colleague Senator Casey recognising the significant suite of measures the Government has brought forward in response to the unforeseen and outside-of-our-control war instigated by America and Israel on Iran and the knock-on impact that is having around the world, and particularly here in Ireland, on the cost of energy and, in the first instance, fuel.

If the fuel protests and the blockades were instructive in anything, it is that the Irish public is triggered. We are recalling the reverberations of the illegal war in Ukraine that the Russians instigated in 2022 and the knock-on cost inflation, the knock-on impact in all of our pockets and the stress that it brought to all of our lives.

While it is important to acknowledge the suite of measures that Senator Casey has outlined and to acknowledge the particular struggles of those on lower incomes and pensions that the Government strove to address in budget 2026, including improvements to the working family payment, extension of the fuel allowance season, increase in the pension, and the expansion of the free school books scheme and school meals programme, I will use the my time implore of the Minister of State in advance of budget negotiations this year, and in the ongoing monitoring that his Department and our senior colleague are doing of the situation as it unfolds, to put working families to the forefront of their minds. These are families who may not qualify for social welfare supports but are under intense pressure raising children and trying to keep the lights on and food on the table.

The impact on parents is exponential and it is felt across everyday costs such as school shoes, uniforms, jackets, schoolbooks, hair cuts, sports gear, activities fees, voluntary school contributions, transition year school fees, the cost of taking children to school where parents cannot get them on a school bus or there is not a school bus route in their area, school-mandated digital devices, third-level costs including the now-reduced but still substantial fees, transport, accommodation and student living expenses, teenage clothing and lifestyle expectations. Thank God for Vinted. All of those pressures exist for the average family in Ireland today alongside the rise in the basic cost of living such as grocery bills, electricity bills, fuel and transport costs. Parents are racing from pillar to post working very hard to bring in the income to cover what feel like everyday bills and everyday bills are growing. We have to deliver further supports for working families in our upcoming budget.

I will use my time to propose five targeted interventions that we could look at, and I would ask the Minister of State to look at, to support ordinary families with school children and those with third-level students that they are supporting. We have to look at the reintroduction of energy credits if we face into another winter with soaring energy costs.

We must consider double child benefit payments. The two peak costly times for any working family are pre-back-to-school in August and the November-December period around the Christmas season. We should broaden eligibility for the back-to-school allowance for those in receipt of social welfare and just outside of the social welfare eligibility category.

While there is no Department of Education and Youth mandated school device policy, I am hearing from constituents right across Limerick that more and more schools are bringing in a one-to-one device policy. It is up to each individual secondary school to do that but they are trying to follow the Department's guidance on keeping pace with technology and ensuring children are digital ready, and to access resources that are available for secondary school students online and for uniformity, schools are bringing in a one-to-one policy where the parents are asked to get Chromebooks or a particular type of device, usually at lower cost or as low as possible. For some parents, if they have two children in their household with that required in September, they are facing an additional bill of nearly €1,000 before the put a shirt on the child's back going to school. In light of the increased popularity of these devices in secondary schools and the fact that we want our children to be digitally enabled, we need to introduce some sort of scheme to cover the cost of those devices for families.

We need to consider reform of the Student Universal Support Ireland, SUSI, means-testing to exclude the earnings of the student. While I welcome that we broadened the threshold for eligibility for a SUSI grant and, in fact, a household can be earning up to €120,000 now and be eligible for a SUSI grant, the catch is that the student's earnings are taken into consideration. We should free up the students altogether, exclude them from the determination of the means test for the household, and allow them to juggle their school requirements with some part-time work. It would mean that we would not have to increase the expenditure on the SUSI grant but that more people are allowed to support themselves, as they are able to, through their third-level experience.

Those are my suggestions. I look forward to talking to the Minister of State and our party colleagues further as we approach the budget for 2027.We have to keep families with small mouths to feed at the forefront of our minds when we are developing that budget.