No. There has been no interim or draft report.

I acknowledge again on behalf of the Government that we know the cost of living is rising and inflation is running at about 5%. As far back as last March, before the Deputy and his party were doing so, I was signalling concerns about the fact a period of inflation was likely to arise, and that is happening now. As far back as last June I was advocating for a tax, welfare and pensions package in the budget, which others, including the Deputy's party, opposed at the time. The Government acknowledges the cost of livin…

The Deputy's party co-chairs the government in Northern Ireland. Sinn Féin has been in office there for most of the past 20 years. The Minister of Finance in Northern Ireland is a Sinn Féin MLA, a member of Deputy Doherty's party. Do not tell me Sinn Féin does not have fiscal levers and fiscal tools; it does. It just has to make choices to remove funding from one area and allocate it to another. That is what governments have to do. What the government Sinn Féin co-leads in Northern Ireland has done is minimal compa…

I acknowledge again the seriousness of this issue, the fact the cost of living is rising and rising fast, that many families are feeling the pinch and that the Government needs to act. As I said in my response earlier, the Government has already acted but we will need to do more. The budget, which was passed in October and which only came into effect a few weeks ago, included a cost-of-living package worth more than €1 billion. That included increases in pensions and welfare and reductions in personal taxation for …

If Deputy Ó Ríordáin can avoid the cheap political jibes for the next day or two or the next few weeks, I will publicly come in here and compliment him on that. He is very capable of that. When it comes to one issue, personal taxation, I respectfully disagree with Deputy Ó Ríordáin. There are people earning €38,000, €40,000, €45,000 per year who are struggling with the bills too. People may have very high incomes on paper or even middle incomes on paper, but when account is taken of income tax, childcare, rent and …

Those exact same people can struggle with the bills. The best way to help those who struggle with the bills is to increase their income or reduce the amount of tax they pay and then they can decide what they spend it on, whether it is the mortgage, rent, childcare or energy costs, because everyone's finances are different. The advantage of pay increases and reducing personal taxation is that you can help everyone. That is why we stand over that decision. I agree on childcare. That is why we brought in two years of …

The Low Pay Commission was established back in 2016-----

By the Labour Party and Fine Gael.

You are welcome. It is a statement of fact. It is also a statement of fact what I said earlier but the Deputy is not willing to accept those facts. In 2016, the Labour Party and Fine Gael together established the Low Pay Commission. Since then the national minimum wage has increased by 26%. Inflation has increased by 7%. While the Deputy is talking and speechifying and demanding increases in the national minimum wage, we have actually done it. We have increased the minimum wage ahead of inflation since 2016. I appr…

The Deputy mentioned companies like BP and Shell.

BP and Shell are international companies. They are not companies that are based here and they are not companies that are, in the round, taxed here. It does show this is an international problem. The main driver of inflation is the rise in gas and oil prices, which is affecting us here, and that drives up the cost of other things too. The main drivers are international. That is the underlying cause.

We have to treat the symptoms of that by helping people with their family budgets. I do not believe the ESB should make bumper profits this year and we have a mechanism for dealing with that. The ESB is a State-owned company. It pays us a substantial dividend every year. We can take a larger dividend. It is not the case that it can just run up huge profits and put them in a bank account somewhere. We are the shareholder. We take a substantial dividend from the ESB. If it runs up huge profits this year, we can take …

I thank the Deputy. The Government continues to conduct appropriate contingency planning that considers a number of perspectives, including consular support for citizens. At the same time it is important to remember that intensive international efforts to secure a negotiated diplomatic resolution to the tensions are ongoing. At the moment there are no plans to withdraw staff or evacuate our embassy in Kyiv. The Department of Foreign Affairs will continue to keep the security situation under review in line with its …

I thank the Deputy. It is prescient and appropriate to raise this issue in the House because if Russia invades Ukraine this will become a very big issue for Ireland and indeed for the EU. As I said, contingency planning is under way for different scenarios but perhaps we need to upgrade or scale up the kind of contingency planning we are doing. The Deputy makes a very valid point in that regard. Obviously, the first response is to protect our citizens in Ukraine and to ensure they are safe and can get out if they n…

I thank the Deputy. I am going to have to come back to him on the SCSI standards as I do not have a note on that at the moment. As I understand it, the €240 being offered in Northern Ireland has not been paid to anyone yet.

Yes, but the Deputy is critical of------

I accept that. Will the Deputy accept-----

Yes. Will the Deputy accept that Sinn Féin is not giving it to everyone in the North? It is only giving it to-----

-----a limited number of groups. Second, would the Deputy accept that it is hypocritical of him to criticise us for not yet paying the energy grant that has been announced, when exactly the same thing is happening in the North? An energy grant of £240, or whatever the amount is, was announced but has not been paid because the legislation has not gone through, yet the Deputy criticises us for the exact same thing. That makes no sense.

I was wrong on that point, but the Deputy is a hypocrite.