I welcome the public in the Gallery to our session. I will now take Leaders' Questions under Standing Order 38. I call Deputy Mary Lou McDonald.

The urgent need for an emergency budget grows by the day. In the past week, we have had report after report all saying the same thing: this crisis is getting worse. This morning, we heard that rising prices hit the average household by close to €2,000 a year. Families are under huge pressure to keep up with the cost of groceries, fuel, insurance and energy bills, and €2,000 is a lot of money for those working families. For many, it is the difference between staying afloat or going under.

The big question everyone is asking is: what is the Taoiseach waiting for? How bad do things have to get before he wakes up and acts? What happened on Friday last should be a loud wake-up call for his Government. PrepayPower, Ireland's largest pay-as-you-go energy provider, announced sharp hikes in its electricity and gas prices. Nearly 250,000 customers will see their average yearly bill shoot up by almost €300 and that is only the start. More increases are on the way.

We already have the highest electricity prices in Europe, which was confirmed by Eurostat today. We pay €480 a year more compared to the EU average. Other suppliers will hike their prices in coming weeks, and why would they not? The big energy companies have nothing to fear from the Government. It has not laid a glove on them. It has taken no action to get prices down and its gutless, carte blanche approach and refusal to rein in these companies has left us with the highest electricity bills in Europe, bills that are landing now and have pushed more than 300,000 households into arrears. People are sick of the Government standing back as they take hit after hit. It will not take on the energy companies to get the prices down. It will not provide energy credits to help households with bills and it pushes back against the immediate need for an emergency budget. We have a do-nothing Government led by a do-nothing Taoiseach.

As prices go through the roof, the Government leaves people in desperate situations - stress, worry, cutting back, going without and working hard but still struggling for the basics - but it has the resources to act. The surplus provides room to help but the Government's message to the working people of Ireland is to struggle on, make do and wait for next year's budget as the bills pile up. This is not just a bad political choice; this is, in fact, a dereliction of the Taoiseach's duty to the people who keep this country going. Tá tuilleadh arduithe ar phraghsanna leictreachais os ár gcomhair amach, ach tá Fianna Fáil agus Fine Gael fós sásta suí siar agus faic a dhéanamh. Tá cáinaisnéis éigeandála agus creidmheasanna fuinnimh ag teastáil láithreach.

The time for lame excuses is over and the time for action is now. An emergency budget is not just another call from Sinn Féin. It is essential to help prevent households from going to the wall. Energy credits are vital to help families cope with runaway electricity prices. It boils down to this. The Taoiseach can either deliver an emergency budget, provide the energy credits, give households the lifeline they desperately need, or he can stand back and continue to do nothing.

Ní aontaím in aon chor leis an Teachta. Tá an-chuid déanta ag an Rialtas go dtí seo, idir an cháinaisnéis a bhí againn agus an pacáiste a d’fhoilsigh muid coicís ó shín, chun an brú atá gan dabht ar theaghlaigh agus ar mhuintir na hÉireann a ísliú agus a laghdú. Mar aon leis sin, tá an-chuid infheistíochta curtha isteach againn i seirbhísí oideachais, sláinte agus i go leor seirbhísí eile.

I just want to say at the outset that the Government from the budget onwards has focused on investment in services and alleviating pressures on families, and will continue to do so. We acknowledge that there are significant pressures on people because of a range of issues, not least the impact on fuel prices arising from the Middle Eastern war, which follows the tariff issue and which follows the situation with the invasion in Ukraine, and the post-Covid inflationary cycle that occurred then, which was at 10%. One of the challenges here is how to respond properly, sensitively and in a targeted way that also maintains economic balance and proportion. What I mean by that is that if we were to take the Sinn Féin budgetary package that it put forward at the last budget, and if we were to add the €3 billion and more, we would be looking at inflation rates of about 5% or 6% in our economy. That is the reality of it. You have got to be careful. You can keep spending more and more money every month but it will have an inflationary impact and we will be chasing inflation. That will not alleviate pressures on working families because when inflation gets higher, it is those on the lowest incomes who will suffer the most. We have to be extremely targeted in how we do things, both sectorally and in terms of low-income groups. Remember we have reduced VAT already in terms of electricity charges down to 9% and we are going to maintain that out to 2030. That just gets ignored when the Deputy lists everything.

We announced a €755 million to €770 million package recently to alleviate the pressures on the public and, indeed, on crucial sectors around food production and around haulage, and on many thousands of workers working in those sectors. Also, as we were doing that, we have increased expenditure on education by €646 million additional to the budget. We have choices here. You cannot have it each way and every way. We are keeping a focus-----

The sums are wrong in the budget.

-----on those services. If you keep spending billions now, you will not have the money for education, special education, childcare reductions and health services. You will not have the funding for all of that at the next budget or, indeed, for next year.

On what we have done so far, we extended and increased the fuel allowance and we expanded it in terms of the number of people it covers, particularly those on the working family payment. The minimum wage has increased significantly. We have deferred the carbon tax increases and we have a variety of packages for a range of sectors. Our social welfare payments went up €10 in the last budget. It has come under huge pressure since then, and I acknowledge that. We also put in record increases to child income support payments - the highest on record. That was a really significant and targeted message. The way the Deputy wants it is that she wants not to do that. She wants us to move away from that sort of targeting approach.

Then, in the context of the October budget, we will have available to us other mechanisms like tax and other measures that we can introduce that can benefit people to get them over the winter period, which is going to be a crucial period for all.