Ceisteanna ó Cheannairí - Leaders' Questions
Dail Éireann — 2025-10-01
============================================================

Holly Cairns (SD), Cork South-West

I do recognise the big surpluses, and something the Social Democrats highlight every year at budget time and, indeed, throughout the year is that they need to be spent wisely because they are not necessarily forever. It is exactly a year ago today since the previous budget, a giveaway on steroids basically to try to buy the election. Now that there is no election on the horizon, the Government has suddenly realised that untargeted one-off measures are not a good idea, as if giving €100 million in energy credits to owners of holiday homes ever made sense. Meanwhile, last year the number of children living in consistent poverty doubled. I will repeat that. There were record budget surpluses, €100 million was given to holiday home owners and the number of children living in consistent poverty doubled.
This Government and the previous Government have consistently squandered opportunities to make a real difference to those children's lives. Budgets are about choices and the Government has a big choice to make next week on how it spends public money. The Social Democrats has outlined a number of suggestions and new ideas that would alleviate child poverty. Will the Government reconsider introducing a second tier of child benefit payment?

---

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/2025-10-01/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-09-14T01:01:00+00:00
Sitting date: 2025-10-01