I thank Independent Ireland for bringing forward this motion on a fiscal planning framework. The motion calls for a framework that would set out an economic policy response to external shocks in terms of financial supports and taxation. There is undoubtedly a need to provide certainty and confidence and to re-establish trust by clearly setting out the measures that would be considered during future crises. The energy shock we are still living through was met with a Government response that was and still is completely inadequate. It exposed a deep lack of preparation and an unwillingness to act on the part of the Government. We saw a dangerous inertia in the face of a crisis from Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Independents. Instead of action, they sat on their hands while people were literally crying out for help. There was an attitude across Government that it was nothing to do with it. It acted like responding to international prices was not a job of government. It through up its hands and blamed the markets. The primary duty of any government is to protect its people, to protect the economy and people's livelihoods but week after week, as people were crying out for help, this Government turned away. It went further than that. Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Independents took an approach of talking down to people. They refused to listen to what people were telling them and what they were going through. People should never have to take to the streets to force this Government to act like we saw during the fuel protests. However, that does not just happen; it takes people feeling like they have no other option. The truth is that trust has been destroyed. That is why the proposals set out in this motion should be taken seriously. Sectors like the haulage sector, the agriculture sector and the fisheries sector were all treated as disposable by this Government, and that can never, ever happen again. Those sectors are still under massive pressure. This is not solely about specific sectors, however, as we know. Just like the protests, this is about a broader issue of cost of living, a crisis that affects so many people the length and breadth of this State, a crisis that is still raging today. It was not caused just by Trump and Israel's reckless war in Iran. It was here before that. Obviously, the most recent energy spikes were brought on by that war but that came on the back of years of relentless price increases, a crisis the Government has failed to get under control and, indeed, a crisis it has added to. Right now the cost-of-living crisis is worse than ever. Many households and small businesses are on the brink. The price of green diesel, for example, is at unsustainably high levels. Home heating oil has hit record prices and the Government still refuses to cut it by a single cent in excise. Record numbers cannot pay their electricity bills. Some 320,000 families, one in four, cannot pay their gas bills. Yet we have a Government that plans to increase taxes on gas, home eating oil and coal in the autumn, just a couple of months away, as people face into the winter. Most people, schools, organisations and businesses have been completely let down and left on their own. Every worker in this State was abandoned last year in the budget by this Government when it gave more than €1 billion in tax cuts to those at the top and left workers worse off. When people were drowning under the cost-of-living crisis, this Government chose not to give them a helping hand. People are working harder now than ever. They are doing longer hours. They are working every hour God sends them just trying to keep their heads above the water. They are paying more and more, yet somehow they are falling behind. I welcome the constructive proposals in this motion but the only way to respond to the scale of the pressure is with an emergency budget and to take a fraction of the surpluses for this year and use it to take the pressure off people right now. We have had report after report, more and more evidence stacking up, all of it just telling us what people already know: that life is unaffordable, that it is a struggle and that something needs to give. Workers know their pay cheque does not stretch to the end of the week any more. Pensioners know the massive pressures and costs they are under, and the measly increase in last year's budget did not even keep up with food inflation. You can draw a straight line from that to the fact that the number of older people living in poverty has doubled under the Government's watch. These are our older people, the people who have lived their lives, paid their taxes and done everything right, yet the number of them in poverty has now doubled under the Government's watch. We would not need an automatic framework if we had a Government in touch with what is going on up and down this country and if we had a Government that was in touch with the pressure that people are under. We need to help people in the here-and-now but that has to be used just to buy time to make the actual long-term reforms. This Government has done none of that, however. It has done one-off measures that have never been combined with any meaningful change to make lasting difference to people's lives. We have remained trapped in a cost-of-living crisis because the Government has run out of ideas. It just outsources responsibility to the European Union or to the markets and that has failed and is continuing to fail people. I will continue to raise this over and over again because people really need it, right here and right now. We need an emergency cost-of-living package, we need an emergency budget and it cannot be held back any longer.

Sentiment score: -0.14