Ceisteanna ó Cheannairí - Leaders' Questions Dail Éireann — 2023-07-04 ============================================================ Leo Varadkar (FG), Dublin West We would not be talking about full employment. We would be talking about how we would find money to pay jobseeker's benefit. We would not be talking about record levels of trade and investment. We would be talking about a budget deficit, how we are going to borrow the money to close that deficit at what the interest rate would be, and how we would curtail spending and increase taxes to cover that. The reason we have full employment, the reason we have a budget surplus, the reason we can have tax cuts, the reason we can increase pensions, the reason we can increase pensions, the reason we can increase welfare and the reason we can invest more in health, housing and education is because we did not have a Sinn Féin Government for the past 12 years. --- 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/2023-07-04/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:52:06+00:00 Sitting date: 2023-07-04