Ceisteanna ó Cheannairí - Leaders' Questions
Dail Éireann — 2026-10-01
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Ged Nash (LAB), Louth

We are days away from the announcement of budget 2027 and it looks like everything will be leaked in advance, or will the Tánaiste be able to keep a few morsels in his back pocket for budget day? Later today, the Labour Party will publish its alternative budget. We will set out our plans for a future we can all afford. To take on the cost-of-living crisis, our plan is unapologetically and relentlessly focused on three key issues: energy, incomes and child poverty. By taxing wealth sensibly and putting windfall taxes on soaring energy and bank profits, it shows how we can widen and deepen the tax base, and that we can build better public services and support the PAYE workers and households that Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil left behind last year. It also shows that Ireland can afford to provide targeted energy credits worth €400 to over 1.2 million homes that need them, that as a country that remembers what it was to be poor, we can afford a second targeted rate of child benefit and, as a wealthy and highly unequal economy, we can afford to increase social welfare payments by €15 a week, increase public sector pay and index income tax to help workers.
I do not need to tell the Tánaiste that people across the country are worried sick about how they will pay the bills this winter as grocery and energy prices rise higher and higher, and as the Government puts up the cost of public transport. When people read the news today, however, they will also be angry. They will be angry about the waste of public money outlined in the report from the Comptroller and Auditor General covering 2025. We can take our pick of the issues uncovered across Departments and agencies by the Comptroller and Auditor General.
We need to know what the Government is doing about irresponsible spending and how it will budget effectively and responsibly for next year and beyond. Last year, a €600 million hole was left in the budget of the Department of education, but there is also a growing overspend in the Department of Health of close to €1 billion. Can we expect there to be cuts of that magnitude next year to the budgets of other Departments to protect essential healthcare, or will the Government, like we do, present honest, fully funded budgets?
The publication of existing level of service, ELS, estimates from the Parliamentary Budget Office yesterday shines a light on the dilemma and realities faced by the Government. It reckons that when all the known demands on the available pot of money are factored in for new spending, just €1 billion would be left next year for new measures, new public services and new innovations. That money will be to cover the promises that the Tánaiste and his colleagues have already made on childcare, the cost of disability, carers, education and so on. That €1 billion is also about the same size as the predicted health overspend. How is the Government going to fund it all? Will there be up to €1 billion of cuts in other Departments next year to fund overspends in health, or will the Government be responsible and increase taxes on wealth to fund the scale of public services and income supports our country needs?

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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/2026-10-01/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-10-05T01:01:00+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-10-01