Ged Nash: Government Has No Answer to Ireland's Perma-Crisis

Thanks very much, Ciann Comhairle and Minister. You will know only too well because you are across from us now practically every week dealing with motions from various iterations of the opposition about the challenges that families and small businesses across this country are encountering because of the fact that Ireland is simply unaffordable for far too many people in 2026. It's the umpteenth motion that has been tabled in this house since the general election and we like to call this challenge the cost of living crisis. But Minister it's not a crisis because crisis suggests something temporary, something that will pass. This is a perma-crisis for the want of a better description. It is a structural problem in our economy that is affecting our society and the reality is that outside of thinking that throwing money at some problems is a solution, the government has no solution to the structural problems facing our economy and our society. Now for example if government thinks that addressing the structural problems in the hospitality sector is going to be solved by throwing an inefficient, stupid tax cut at hospitality sector businesses that simply won't work in the way that we would all like to see happen, then you have another thing coming. It makes no sense and in reality it's reflective of a kind of paucity of thinking at government level, a lack of imagination and a tired managerialism at the heart of this government that's run out of ideas and has actually no mission and no ambition to change this country for the better and for the majority. You're simply picking winners and Edgar Morganroth said in media yesterday that we have fiscal policy run by lobby now in this country and if we regard ourselves as advocates of the people and dare I say lobbyists for the people in this country, there are very few people in this house who are standing up for the taxpayer, very few people and the days that Finnegale will have said they stood up for the taxpayer are gone because of stupid tax cuts like the one that was introduced yesterday that makes no sense whatsoever and actually came at the expense of working people who have paid for this, who've paid for this because the resources available for tax cuts last year and some basic tax relief for working people was swallowed up by one of the stupidest and a long line of stupid tax cuts this government has introduced since 2020 and it goes far far back in fact as 2016. It's a government that's wasted a boom, is reckless with the economy and imprudent with the public finances and it is working people and people who are depending on the state for their incomes who are being affected by this and those chickens will come home to roost and the people who will pay will be those who depend on the state for their income and working people, public servants and others who you've decided not to talk to about successor to the current public sector pay deal that ran out yesterday. So that goes to show you where this government's priorities are. I'll make some basic points on the motion here. There's much to be welcomed, many aspects of it I would quibble with and there is no reference to the need for example to restructure our child care and early years system to make sure that child care is affordable for families. The motion leans extremely heavily into charges associated with fossil fuels. We are not going to make energy cheaper in this country if we continue to rely on fossil fuels I would just keep chasing the price by reducing excise duty and carbon taxes. What we need is a radical approach, a revolution on renewables and that means doing the necessary on offshore wind, realising that moonshot moment that the former Taoiseach Leo Varadkar spoke eloquently about a number of years ago but did very little about in reality. It means making sure that deep retrofits of our homes is not a pursuit merely for the middle class and the wealthy. We need to make sure that SEAI grants to retrofit our homes and introduce renewables are affordable and are income based. We actually need a fossil fuel run car scrapping scheme to make sure that we have the revolution in terms of electric vehicles that we need and we need, as others have said, the reintroduction of targeted energy credits in the next budget to ensure that in the interim, in that move to renewables, that we make heating our homes and businesses more affordable.