Pat Casey (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State for his contribution. I welcome the acknowledgement that budget 2027 will be focused on the family income and the people who are most pressurised in society now. We must ensure that going to work pays a better dividend than not working. I am delighted to see the change in focus for budget 2027.

Ireland's success is incomparable if we think of our resilience and what we have gone through even in the last seven years, with Brexit, the Covid pandemic, the war in Ukraine and now the Iran war. On every one of those occasions, we have been in a position to intervene to provide temporary measures because of the fiscal management of the economy. While we might have differences, spending windfall taxes on day-to-day expenditure is not the policy anyone should follow. We should learn from the past. We have done that before and we have seen the trouble it got us into where we spent all the taxes that were coming in. We have to appreciate that we are putting money away to protect our pensions into the future in relation to the deficit in the National Pensions Reserve Fund. The €23 billion we have put into those funds is welcome.

I do not know if I felt the same heater Senator Conway felt in the lobby, but having it on was a bit of a contradiction. Sometimes I wonder if we can not just install thermostats that shut the heaters off when a certain temperature is reached. Senator Conway and I are probably of a different generation from a lot of people here and sometimes we forget what we have come through. Anybody who came out of college in the late 1970s or 1980s came into a completely different Ireland from the one we see today. Sometimes we forget that and take it for granted. When I came out of college, we had high inflation, the highest levels of unemployment and huge industrial disputes where we were losing hundreds of thousands of workdays every year. The thing that put us on the pathway to success was the social partnership that was agreed in the late eighties. We need to revisit social partnership and re-engage with all the sectors in it in order that we have a stable economy and do not have the issues that arose recently. We do not want the outside world and companies considering FDI looking in and saying Ireland has an unstable economy. We cannot go back there again. We witnessed it, we experienced it and we know what it was like. Many people today have never witnessed that. Social partnership laid the foundation for the success of this State and we must revisit it.

The Government has done what is right and has introduced targeted measures. We cannot spend windfall taxes on reducing excise and VAT. We just cannot keep doing that. We must learn from the past. My colleague Senator Dee Ryan spoke about what we are doing to deal with costs for school-going children. That is helping working families again and I welcome it. I am delighted to hear that budget 2027 will focus on working families and make it worthwhile for people to go to work, which is of key importance. I also thank the Government for the interventions for two specific sectors. Those interventions in haulage and agriculture work their way down to supermarket prices. If we had not intervened, all those prices would be going up in the next day or two.