Ceisteanna ó Cheannairí - Leaders' Questions Dail Éireann — 2026-04-21 ============================================================ Mary Lou McDonald (SF), Dublin Central That is guff, plain and simple. The Taoiseach has given us a catalogue of his own failures. On housing, the metro and infrastructure, it is fail, fail, fail on his part. Now, as we learn that the projected surplus will grow from €5.1 billion to more than €9 billion, the Taoiseach has the poor mouth for struggling families. That is all he is offering. I do not know if the Taoiseach thinks that people live lives of fiction. I want him to hear very clearly that families are struggling now, today, in the here and now. Part of our economic resilience, and the health of our economy and our society, has to be to intervene when families are struggling. You do not leave them in the lurch. You do not leave hundreds of thousands of people unable to meet their electricity bills, or hundreds of thousands of people struggling to pay for their home heating oil. There is an obligation on the Government to listen, to hear and to intervene. Why will it not do that, with all of these additional billions that are now projected? --- 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/2026-04-21/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-09-21T01:01:08+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-04-21