Ceisteanna ó Cheannairí - Leaders' Questions Dail Éireann — 2026-01-14 ============================================================ Micheál Martin (FF), Cork South-Central More fundamentally, we acknowledge that there are very significant pressures on people in terms of costs and pricing and making ends meet. The most effective way to deal with that is how you manage the economy more broadly and how you get inflation down to very low levels and have average wage growth and real income growth that significantly helps people to deal with those pressures. If you look at nominal wage growth in the economy, it is at approximately 5.5% or 5%. Inflation is at 2%. In 2024, 2025 and 2026, we are, for the first time in a while, looking at real income growth, which will help workers. It does not deal with it in its entirety but it will help workers deal with the pressures of increased costs. There were very significant increases in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the oil and energy crisis that arose from that. We decided in the budget to invest in services, which is important in terms of education, health and so forth, but also to invest in social protection to protect the lowest income groups, which we did fairly comprehensively in the last budget. The results are there from the ESRI analysis in terms of the lowest income deciles, which got the highest allocation of resources. I would like the Deputy to acknowledge that. Those are not my figures; they are ESRI figures in respect of that reality. We did it in terms of the fuel allowance. We increased it but we also increased the coverage of it, in other words, 26% of people will now avail of the fuel allowance, particularly those on the working family payment. This will help in that regard. Our population has grown dramatically, which is really putting pressure on services. It is extraordinary that from 1995 to today, our population went up 52%. That has an enormous impact on services. In many ways, there is positivity in that in terms of the Irish economy growing. In the last number of years, that increase has continued. Fundamentally, managing the economy means creating jobs. The most effective way to deal with cost-of-living and poverty pressures is to make sure there is employment available to people. At the moment, our unemployment rate is in or around 5%, if we take 15-year-olds and onwards. Those are the figures, but our rate of participation in employment is increasing all the time and average weekly earnings are up significantly as well. Through the broader management of the economy, investment in services, infrastructure, housing, education, health and childcare are the areas we decided to prioritise in the budget, along with social protection. In the social protection framework, we said we would look after those at risk of poverty as the key priority, and we did that. --- 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/2026-01-14/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:30+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-01-14