Northern Ireland
Dail Éireann — 2023-05-03
============================================================

Leo Varadkar (FG), Dublin West

The Government believes, in respect of the budget announcement by the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, that the people of Northern Ireland are entitled to a functioning Assembly and Executive and to be fully represented by the politicians they elected in May of last year. In recent weeks we have seen cuts to services which will affect the people of Northern Ireland adversely. The budget places difficult decisions in the hands of civil servants and we believe that it is vital that an Executive is in place as soon as possible so it can make the right decisions that respond to the needs of people north of the Border.
As Deputy Tóibín pointed out, Northern Ireland is facing an economic, social and fiscal crisis, and this is further evidence, when one sees the contrast between the UK's budgetary position and ours, that we have made the right choices economically and have a much better economic model. We have full employment, rising levels of public expenditure every year, rising incomes and a budget surplus. The biggest threat to that would be any fundamental change to our economic policy or our European policy, and I hope that does not happen in this country.

---

Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2023-05-03/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:51:50+00:00
Sitting date: 2023-05-03