Ceisteanna ó Cheannairí - Leaders' Questions Dail Éireann — 2026-04-15 ============================================================ Micheál Martin (FF), Cork South-Central I fully accept people are under enormous pressures, in particular because of the war in the Middle East. People have had to endure a range of shocks going back to Covid and right through the war in Ukraine which had a severe impact on oil and energy prices and fed into general significant inflation in those years. Then we hit the tariffs a year ago, which is having an impact on a number of our companies, and now there is a war in the Middle East which has had a severe impact on oil prices again and is feeding into inflation. There is no question that people and families are under huge pressure. The ESRI also said successive Government measures shielded people substantially but could not cover everything. I would say no Government in the European Union has provided as many cost-of-living supports over the past five years as this Government. --- 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/2026-04-15/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:49+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-04-15