I move: That Dáil Éireann: notes that: — the sectors in the Irish economy such as farming, fisheries, construction and more generally small businesses and households have in recent years been repeatedly exposed to severe economic shocks arising from major international events outside the control of the State, including the Covid-19 Pandemic, the war in Ukraine, instability and conflict involving Iran and the wider Middle East, and ongoing international trade disputes and tariff wars; — these events have contributed to sudden and dramatic increases in the cost of fuel, electricity, home heating oil, fertiliser, feed, transport, insurance, construction materials and essential consumer goods; — the frequency and unpredictability of such global disruptions have created major uncertainty for family budgeting, business planning and investment decisions across the Irish economy; — the current approach of Government has largely been reactive in nature, relying on ad hoc emergency interventions announced after price shocks have already inflicted financial damage on households and enterprises; — while emergency supports introduced in recent years provided temporary relief, the absence of a clear and transparent framework has created uncertainty for workers, families and businesses attempting to plan ahead during periods of economic instability; — sectors such as agriculture, haulage, fisheries, construction, hospitality and small retail are particularly vulnerable to sudden increases in fuel and operating costs, while ordinary households remain exposed to spikes in home heating, electricity and grocery prices; — a proactive national framework for economic resilience and emergency fiscal planning would provide certainty, confidence and stability, by clearly setting out the measures that would automatically be considered or triggered during future crises; and — such a framework should recognise that the State cannot prevent global crises from occurring, but can ensure that Irish citizens and businesses are not left without clarity as to how Government will respond when such events arise; recognises that: — certainty and predictability are essential for sustainable household budgeting, business continuity, employment retention and investment planning; — businesses and industries require advance visibility regarding the potential activation of supports, reductions or temporary relief measures during periods of severe inflation or supply disruption; — a transparent, trigger-based system would strengthen confidence in the Irish economy and reduce the uncertainty caused by improvised and delayed policy responses; and — fiscal planning must move beyond crisis reaction and towards structured preparedness; and calls on the Government to: — develop and publish a "Fiscal Planning for Economic Certainty Framework", setting out predetermined economic support measures and response mechanisms, to be considered or activated during major international economic shocks; — establish transparent trigger points, linked to measurable economic indicators including, but not limited to: — fuel and energy price increases; — inflation thresholds; — supply chain disruptions; — agricultural input cost spikes; — international trade restrictions; and — exceptional transport and logistics cost increases; — outline, in advance, the range of temporary relief measures that may be introduced when such trigger points are reached, including: — temporary reductions in excise duties on fuels; — temporary reductions in Value Added Tax rates; — targeted reliefs for the transport, farming, fisheries and small business sectors; — temporary reductions or waivers in commercial rates; — home heating oil and household energy supports; — supports for low- and middle-income households facing exceptional cost-of-living pressures; and — emergency liquidity and working capital supports for vulnerable industries; — ensure that any framework introduced provides sector-specific certainty for strategic domestic industries, including agriculture, fisheries, haulage, tourism, retail and construction; — provide for annual review and updating of the framework by the Department of Finance and the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment, in consultation with representative bodies, trade unions, SMEs, farming and fisheries organisations; — prepare and publish annual stress-testing assessments, examining the resilience of the Irish economy to future international shocks and price surges; and — report to Dáil Éireann within six months, on the establishment and implementation of this framework. This Private Members' motion is about the cost of doing business in Ireland. It involves sectors in the Irish economy such as farming, fisheries and construction, all general small businesses, every person working in this country, and the shocks arising from events outside of this country. What we are looking at here is a case of fail to prepare, prepare to fail. A definition of madness is doing the same thing over and over again when there is no change. It is a form of madness. We had Covid. After that, we had the Ukraine war. Now, we have the war in Iran. Every time something happens, the Government reacts but it is not proactive. We now know that, in the world in which we live, shocks are going to come all the time. It might be every three or four years. Previously, it was a cycle of ten years when different things happened, but now it is getting more frequent and this Government has learned nothing from this. It comes in with packages after people have had to protest because they are in desperate situations. Small businesses are closing their doors. The minimum wage is going up but the person on the minimum wage gets nothing extra because inflation has passed the minimum wage and the consumer ends up paying for the same thing over and over again. Who is the winner in this? It is the Government. I attended a meeting of the Committee on Budget Oversight, of which I am Cathaoirleach, yesterday. It was a two-hour slot and the Tánaiste, Simon Harris, and the Minister for public expenditure, Jack Chambers. The latter had all of his Department behind him. It worked out that I was left with 40 minutes in which to speak at the very end, although that did not work out for them. I asked them different questions and I wanted to see how the Department of public expenditure was working with regard to accountability. I wanted to know who was held accountable for doing something wrong. I mentioned the national children's hospital. The Tánaiste was the person who signed off on the children's hospital, which is €1 billion over budget. Has anyone been held accountable for that? The answer is "No". Has anyone in the Department been held accountable for giving bad advice? The answer is "No", but if the Government goes to the electorate tomorrow morning, it will be held to account. When are Ministers in this Cabinet going to stand up to their Departments and make them accountable for bad advice? What I see is this Government on a railway track. The problem is that it goes from A to B on the track, but if there is a difficulty in the middle, it cannot seem to negotiate that. We have to stop the train. We have to do something. It just goes from A to B. It is a case of tunnel vision with no change. Shocks happen to businesses every time something happens. What could the Government learn? I asked questions yesterday of this Government. I asked whether it could try a cap on fuel costs? I asked whether it could try one sector to see whether we could introduce something, but I was told we could not because something would then have to do without, but the Tánaiste and Minister did not realise why I was asking that. I wanted to see their mindset. They are following the same rhetoric all the time. If you follow the same thing all the time and it does not change, it is a sign of madness. The madness is that the people in Ireland suffer, yet there are people making bad decisions all the time and getting away with it. If I ran my business the way this Government is running the people's business, I would not be in business, but when you do something wrong in a Department or Government, you get rewarded. You get shoved to a different job if you do something wrong and we end up with failure after failure being rewarded within Departments. It is a proven fact. Look at Uisce Éireann. Look at the set-up of it. It has not delivered but it costs the country billions of euro. I do not need all this paperwork in front of me because I understand the problems. I asked the Minister, Deputy Chambers, yesterday about how we might go about introducing something. He told me a fund would have to be put away year after year to allow for shocks. Let me provide him with a little education. I look at the young people in the Gallery and it reminds me that if we want something in life, we must save for it. I guarantee that when the Cathaoirleach Gníomhach wanted things throughout his life, he saved up to buy them. If something went wrong, he had a rainy day fund. Five years on, the Government has not learned that instead of panic when something happens, we need the rainy day fund to come out. We need capping systems whereby if something hits a level, measures are introduced without the big television announcements and Ministers fighting with each other trying to get money for their Department from another Department. In the end, when something is given to the public, most people do not get it and it is all held up in administration. Construction costs have gone up from €120 to €200 per square foot in five years. That means the Government take from the VAT rate of 23% has increased. In addition, it is getting more from the 13.5% VAT on labour. I asked Department officials at the budgetary oversight committee yesterday for figures on the increase in VAT intake. I was initially told it had increased by 6% this year but before we had finished our slot, it had dropped to 3%. A huge panel of departmental officials were in front of me yesterday and they could not give me an answer. The figure went from 6% to 3% in the space of 40 minutes. Shocks are going to happen and Ireland will be the first to feel them. The fund we have asked the Government to put away for a rainy day should be based on a capping system and should be ready to be rolled out to the public when something happens. The Government introduced a scheme for the agricultural sector that was to give people 12 cent, before then announcing it was based on the previous 12 months' figures. That meant the 12 cent came down to 8 cent. What the Government could have done was implement two half-yearly slots. There are people who do silage bales in one part of the year and tillage in the other part. There are two different sectors. Not everyone who does silage, baling, hay and so on does tillage. There are also a lot of companies doing plant hire operations and agricultural work that do not qualify under the scheme even though their staff are out cleaning dykes, stretching ditches and all of that type of work. The Government then said it would introduce a scheme to give fuel costs to the transport sector and that it would only deal with the Irish Road Haulage Association. The latter represents 17% of the transport networks in this country. It does not reflect the position of 100% of operators. I agree with what the association got but it would not have secured it only for the people of Ireland standing up and telling the Government there was no other option. What does the Government need to learn from the debate on this motion? It must learn that it needs to be proactive in putting the funds away now. Come the next election, it will pay for the billions of euro it has lost through bad management and the bad advice it received. The Department will not learn. Maybe it is time to introduce something to investigate how much bad management and bad advice to the Government costs the State. We need to see where accountability lies for bad advice given to the Government that makes every person in this country suffer, regardless of his or her business. That is what we are trying to achieve. When I said this yesterday, the response was that they do not know how to get off the railway track. We must look at this issue and the measures we are proposing must be implemented. Doing the same thing over and over again is a sign of madness.

Sentiment score: -0.12

The contributions from the Government side and their colleagues show why we are in the position we are in. I spoke to some of those who contributed. They said they would like to see the people in the middle, the working class, looked after in this budget. One person told me he got elected the same day as the Minister of State, which was the same day I got elected. Since I got elected, they are the people I have been looking to have looked after. It has taken the Government six years to even come out and say that it wants the people who are working to be looked after. Six years later, this is what the Government comes out with. I will give the Minister of State a small insight into the six years his party has been in government. We will go to the working, squeezed middle. We will take an average house as an example. If somebody wanted to buy or build a 2,000 sq. ft house, it would have cost of €240,000 plus VAT. That meant that five or six years ago, that house cost of €272,406. Let us travel forward. Today, five or six years later, that same house costs €454,000, including VAT. The VAT to the Government has gone from €32,400 to €54,000. That is a tax take on somebody trying to provide their own home. It is the working squeezed middle. This is two people who are working, trying to provide a roof over their head, probably trying to start a family and trying to secure their livelihoods. What the Government has done with the stroke of a pen is that has taken €22,000 extra in tax from people building or buying their own house. That is not all the Government has done. I will use the model of 40% of a person's income to afford a mortgage. Five years ago, if a person had to get a mortgage of €270,000 to build a house, they would have to have earnings of €3,830 per month to afford a repayment of €1,532 per month. That is based on a 4.75% interest rate. A person would end up paying €189,650 in interest on a house worth €270,000. By the time everything was repaid, a person would repay €460,000. Today, that house would cost €450,000. A person would have to have earnings of €6,252.50 per month for repayments of €2,500 per month. In five years, the Government has almost doubled the cost of buying or building a house. The Government has increased its tax take not only on the building of the house but the person is now paying 40% in income tax. It is tax on top of tax. That is what the Government has done in five years. Every one of the Government speakers said there was so much money and that was why the Government could give the targeted €750 million. They said it was due to the war in Ukraine, the war in Iran and Covid. These are all knee-jerk reactions. The Minister, Deputy Chambers, told us yesterday that if the Government had to do this, it would have to put X amount of money away every year to counteract this. The problem is the Government has gone €1 billion over budget on a hospital that has not been delivered yet. It has misspent on bike sheds and huts - €1.4 million. If you add up all the money the Government has misspent, that would be money that would there today to introduce measures when prices rise. When fuel hits a certain level, for example, it could be automatically added. All the money the Government has misspent would actually cover the people today. It would bring down inflationary costs. Everything the Government has done has driven inflation. It has doubled the cost of buying and building a house. It has doubled the cost of buying a car. It has doubled the cost of running a vehicle and it has doubled its tax intake on the same thing. That is all the Government is doing. Yesterday I spoke to officials from the Department. I asked what the VAT intake was up by this year. The first thing they said was that it was up by 6%. Some 40 minutes later, they said it was only up by 3%. The officials do not even know what they are doing in their own Department. That is how clued in they are. These are the people advising the Minister. These are the people the Minister and the Government is defending every single day. The problem we have here is that Ministers are just fronts for Departments that are making mistakes and the Ministers are not holding them to account. The Ministers are just fronts and they are told what to do every day. When are Ministers going to take responsibility and take on their own Departments and tell them they are wrong? Tell people they are not the right people for the job, to get out and to get people who can actually manage the purse and finances and get us accountability. When are Ministers going to stand up for that? What is wrong is that Ministers are deciding to put their careers over the people of this country. It is all down to career politicians. The day people do not want me in this House, I will be quite happy to go. The day I cannot contribute to try to help the vulnerable people in this country, I will be quite happy to go. The only reason I am here is to help those vulnerable people. It is not to get a job in Cabinet or a promotion like most of the Cabinet. They will do and say anything to get a better job. I do not mind if the Government delivers something. I do not mind if anyone in the House delivers something. My job in the House is to make sure that delivery is done. The Government can have all of the praise in the world for delivering once the job is done. That is a person who does not mind about careers. I have my career. I have family. I have dependents. They are crippled week in and week out with over-taxation by the Government. The Government has said it will deliver and provide a scheme here and there. The only scheme is the scheme the Government is doing for itself. The Government introduced a retrofit grant. I have explained the cost of building over the past five years. The retrofit grant for oil-based properties to insulate houses requires silicone and PVC which are oil-based products, the cost of which have increased. The grants are worth nothing. The Government puts pressure on something that is inflated. The Government has put pressure on an oil-based product and is talking about the environment. The Government is investing taxpayers' money and driving inflation. The Government has decided that when something is under pressure, it will put more pressure on it. We are one-tenth of 1% of global emissions. People in the country are going hungry. The Government thinks more about targeting something and trying to put fossil fuel vehicles off the road when they are the only thing that vulnerable people can afford in order to go to work. That is what the Government is doing. It is punishing everyone. The Government has a big wad of money which it misspent. There should be a full inquiry into Departments regarding the misuse of funding. That is what should be done. We could then see how many people that misspent money could have helped. There are many career politicians in government who give an old spatter now and then but are not seen in their own areas. They are only seen there for a picture. They run in and out. They give all the promises to get themselves elected, but do not want to do any delivery. That is the issue with Government. Until the Government takes on its Departments and makes them accountable, it is only a front. That is what it is. Minister are backing up something they are told before they walk into the House. They are handed a paper. I do my own. I do not need a Department to tell me it is wrong because I can see it in all of the paperwork we get and the misspent money in this country is all down to Departments giving the Government bad advice. Members of Government say, "Yes sir", "No sir" and "I want a promotion for that". That is what they do. The Government encourages and promotes people for doing wrong and every Irish person in this country is suffering.

Sentiment score: 0.02

Timmy do-little is at it again, is he?

Sentiment score: 0.00