I am pleased to have the opportunity to support Deputy Healy's motion. The contents of the motion will not be unfamiliar to those in opposition who have tabled broadly similar motions week in and week out over the last few years. What will not be lost on us either is the nature of the rather routine response that we receive from the Government, as we saw in the Minister of State, Deputy Dillon's, response to the motion earlier on. With respect, I have no doubt that in his response in closing the debate, the Minister of State, Deputy Grealish, may respond in the same vein, telling us how successful the economy is, how well employment is growing and how resilient the Irish economy is. However, the economy exists for the principal reason of servicing the needs of our society. We have a very successful economy objectively. Many of us have played our own role in ensuring that is the case. However, we cannot say with any great certainty that we have a successful society because with a successful economy must come a more equal society. That is the measurement we must use to measure success. The experiences of far too many individuals and families across this country are undeserving of the kind of approach taken by the Government and the credit the Government gives itself for its great, successful economic model and how well the country is doing because the lived experience for far too many people is very remote from that sort of assessment and that sort of analysis. One of the measures in the motion refers very clearly to the problem that we have with food prices and the increased cost of groceries, something that has put Irish families to the pin of their collective collars over the last few years, in particular since 2020 and 2021. A number of factors feed into that. As a practical legislator, I have sought time and time again to propose practical solutions to try to get a better understanding of why food costs in Ireland are so high and why the prices charged at the checkouts for everyday products are so high compared with some analogous countries in the European Union. One of the measures I proposed was my own unfair prices Bill, which was published in 2023. The response by the then Minister for enterprise, Simon Coveney, was to head that off at the pass in the middle of a real crisis with grocery price inflation. He said not only that he thought the principles laid out in my legislation were worthy of consideration, but that he would introduce his own legislation in 2023 to compel supermarkets to be clearer on their margins and to publish certain information so we as consumers could make our own minds up as to whether they were gouging. What did we get? We got two reports from the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission, one in 2023 and, under pressure, another one in the summer telling us effectively that there is nothing to see here and that there is no issue with competition in the Irish supermarket sector. We have had the CCPC rather extraordinarily saying on the one hand that there is no issue with price gouging but on the other hand that it does not really have sufficient information to completely determine that. It said it anyway. How can anybody possibly say that there is no issue with price gouging, with all that entails, if they do not have the complete information? My proposed legislation was finally debated on Second Stage last summer. Why has it not been brought to committee to be interrogated further? The Minister in 2023 thought this was a good idea. Since then, I believe from the data I have read that the annual cost of grocery shopping has gone up by about €2,000 but wages have not. Why can we not properly interrogate this? I do not like to conclude this, but it is quite clear that the Government is simply afraid to take on big business and corporate interests as its actions have shown. We are still waiting for all the powers of the Agri-Food Regulator to be properly commenced. That will actually give the State a very significant weapon to use to ensure greater transparency for primary producers - the farmers, producers, processors and so on that we rely on to purchase food. It will be another important piece of the jigsaw for consumers to figure out who is gouging whom and what the problem is. If we cannot measure the problem, we cannot propose solutions. Time and again we in the Labour Party have published comprehensive and coherent joined-up proposals to address all of the issues that make this country such an expensive place in which to work, in which to do business for a small business, and in which to live and exist. We need a coherent cost-of-living action plan from this Government but we simply do not get it. Decisions were made in the last budget that really make it very clear what the ideological direction of this Government is. On the one hand, the poorest and most marginalised in our society, those who depend on the State for their income and people with disabilities require additional cost-of-living payments to ensure they can make ends meet. We have acknowledged over many years that there is an additional cost to having a disability. As Deputy Ó Murchú said earlier, the Government has more or less admitted there is a problem for people with disabilities who merely exist and do not participate fully in society because of their economic circumstances. The Government has admitted that given that it introduced cost-of-living payments in recent years ahead of the last general election, of course. There is no sign of them now. The Government decided not to do that and instead to provide enormous, unjustified, unwarranted tax breaks for burger barons and big builders, at the expense of those who require cost-of-disability payments and of workers. At the end of January, if you are paid every month and you got a pay increase, which people will receive this year at on average 3% to 4%, you will see that swallowed up because the personal taxation system was not indexed last year. Much if not all of that pay increase will not make it into people's pay packets or bank accounts every week, every second week or every month. Instead it will go to the Exchequer. They are the decisions the Government has made. The motion refers to the need to introduce a living wage. I established the Low Pay Commission back in 2015 with the sole intention of ensuring that Irish workers would ultimately enjoy a living wage. We have a real problem with in-work poverty, and that problem remains. While we are closer now to achieving a living wage than we were, we are very tardy about it. The Government has not met its own targets for the introduction of a living wage. The longer we wait to introduce a living wage, perversely, the more costs will arise for the Exchequer. We spend an enormous amount of money essentially subsidising low pay and subsidising big corporations that are paying hard-working people poverty wages. That is an outrageous commentary on our priorities as a country. Working people should by definition enjoy a living wage, sufficient income to have a reasonable, modest lifestyle, something that people in a rich economy should be entitled to expect. Something else we did not do in the budget for this year was index social welfare rates. Most modern, sophisticated economies analogous to Ireland have some form of indexation of social welfare rates and personal taxation rates. I have been a proponent of this for many years. It could fundamentally address some very real problems we have with in-work poverty and standards of living more generally. We in Labour support the motion. We thank Deputy Healy and his colleagues for introducing it and we look forward to voting in favour of it next week.

Sentiment score: 0.14