The ground is still too damp in Clare to get the tractors in for the hay, but we are aiming for July, all things going well, and maybe we will get a bit of silage as well.

Sentiment score: 0.65

Yes, we are still hurling. I am glad to have the opportunity to speak in this debate. I support the Government amendment. I thank the Minister of State for his efforts. It is very important that we have fiscal prudence. I was elected on the same day as the Minister of State back in 2020. That whole five-year period felt quite different. There was relative global economic stability, whereas things have been anything but on the global scene since then, with several wars in the Middle East and the Russo-Ukrainian war now going beyond the four-year mark, and all the turbulence that has brought. Ireland, as a small island nation on the western periphery of Europe, very much feels those shocks when they happen. That sets the whole budgetary context. It sets the need for prudence to be intrinsic in all of our plans as we make our way forward for budget 2027, which will be announced in October. Prudence has got us to a stable point. Our neighbours in the United Kingdom, with a much larger economy that for centuries had a dominant position over ours and that of most of continental Europe, have very much felt the shock in recent years. That is down to political instability. Brexit has come back to haunt them time and again, and it continues to destabilise them politically and economically. In line with what others have said, I believe it is important that, as we begin to accelerate preparations for budget 2027, middle Ireland be thought of in this budget. All sorts of measures were brought in last October, some of them popular and some not so popularly received by the public, but the type of people I would like to see accommodated centrally in the next budget are those who get out and work. The Minister of State's former leader called them the people who got up early in the morning. We all get up early, or at some point in the morning. It is the low-to-middle-income earners paying taxes who are very much squeezed. The income tax has to be paid, but when they need a safety net, they find that the thresholds set by Departments, such as the Department of Social Protection, do not allow for them. People are better off in this country if they are extremely wealthy or extremely poor, because they have either the wealth to withstand the shocks that come into their household or they have an income sufficiently low that the safety nets protect them at times of difficulty.

Sentiment score: 0.11