Ceisteanna ó Cheannairí - Leaders' Questions
Dail Éireann — 2026-03-19
============================================================

Simon Harris (FG), Wicklow

I am genuinely not trying to be argumentative or provocative in relation to this because we need to work together on this but I have to say what we do now has an effect on what we can do in the future. The Deputy knows that, I know that and we all know that. The point I am making is, of course, we need to look at what we can do in the here and now. I get that, and that is what we are doing. However, we also need to be conscious, as we stand here in the Dáil in the month of March, of where the global economy could be in the month of September or July. What if the Deputy comes into the House then and says all of a sudden that we are not talking about energy but are talking about this or that. We need to look at this in the round.
The Irish economy approaches this moment of global challenge from a position of relative strength but we have also got to be conscious of leaving ourselves as a country with the flexibility to adapt our response, depending on where the situation goes.
We all hope this de-escalates very quickly, for humanitarian and economic reasons.
The Deputy asked about targeted measures and then made a proposal on excise, which obviously is not targeted. What I would say now is-----

---

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/2026-03-19/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:45+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-03-19