What’s seldom is wonderful and it isn’t very often that the Fianna Fáil leader has a chance to taunt his Sinn Féin counterpart about what he sees as her party’s desire to help struggling millionaires pay their punitive energy bills.
And when Micheál Martin isn’t around to point this out, his Coalition partner, Fine Gael leader Simon Harris, is always similarly delighted to remind Mary Lou McDonald of this.
It makes a novel change from having to absorb the fat cat, golden circle, cosy cartel jibes slung regularly from across the floor during Leaders’ Questions.
The Taoiseach and the Tánaiste have one woman to thank for throwing them this welcome lifeline.
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Bualadh bos for Liz Truss!
Or, a round of applause for the former UK prime minister whose brief tenure in number 10 was outlasted by a lettuce.
Liz of the 49 Days may never know it, but her awful mini-budget which crashed the British economy and sent the markets into turmoil lives long in the memory of Government leaders across the Irish Sea.
Despite having departed the Westminster political scene in 2024, the hapless ex-Tory leader has become a regular fixture during stormy Dáil sessions when the Sinn Féin leader lambastes the Government over its failure to reintroduce energy credits for householders during the winter months.
Having introduced them in response to rising energy costs brought about by the war in Ukraine, the Coalition is now committed to applying targeted measures for people most in need of support. The last payments were in January of this year.
This is not the way to go, argues Mary Lou McDonald, who dialled up her demands for a return to the universal reduction of bills once the evenings begin drawing in.
Now Met Éireann has issued a cold weather warning, temperatures over the coming days are set to plunge to minus-3 and the situation is critical, she told the Taoiseach on Wednesday, quoting a person who contacted her office that morning to say they are anticipating a gas bill in excess of €500 after a huge charge for autumn usage, when the heat had barely been on.
“This is nearly impossible for us. It looks like we will freeze again this year. It is just survival now,” they wrote.
Everything is going up across the board, from groceries to rent to student fees and now a cold snap is setting in, said Mary Lou.
“I am going to ask you again, Taoiseach, and I’m going to ask you plainly: will you please restore the energy credits or are you going to allow people struggle through the winter?”
Did somebody say energy credits?
It’s Truss time.
Micheál opened by rejecting the charge that the Government is not responding to the plight of people struggling with the cost of living. It could do this because the Irish economy had been resilient enough to come through the Brexit years, Covid, the invasion of Ukraine and subsequent energy crisis.
And speaking of which ...
“I recall Deputy McDonald advancing the Liz Truss solution on that occasion, where you wanted to bail out all the energy companies. Liz Truss tried that and look what happened – that’s what happened. You had the Liz Truss approach to the energy crisis and you quickly abandoned it as soon as things went pear-shaped in the UK as a result.”
Three mentions there of the useless PM. (She brought in price caps for domestic charges with equivalent breaks for the energy firms and mayhem ensued.)
[ Energy companies will factor in subsidies to ‘gouge’ customers, Taoiseach saysOpens in new window ]
Once he introduced the Sinn Féin/Liz Truss price caps link, the Taoiseach delivered his list of reductions which have been targeted at people most in need.
There was the extra few bob for the pensioners and free schoolbooks and fuel allowances for a quarter of all households and grants for retrofitting the house and, while he accepted that times are tough for some households, even the rate of inflation is coming down from the high of 2023.
They spluttered in disbelief on the Sinn Féin benches.
“Please,” insisted Micheál. “Sorry, in terms of where it was, it’s coming down. Come on. Cop on ... we need to be upfront with people here.”
His Government “has done more than any other party for a long long time” in directing payments to where they are most needed.
“So we’ve targeted the resources,” he snapped at Mary Lou as her colleagues laughed at him. “You want to look after the millionaires and so on with energy credits? That’s your business.”
Cathy Bennett, Sinn Féin TD for Cavan-Monaghan, was gobsmacked.
“So now we’re millionaires?”
“Bring back the Galway Tent!” one of her colleagues roared at Micheál, which would be the equivalent of the Taoiseach roaring about Liz Truss at them.
“Well, you’ve had a few millionaires in your day across the wa- eh, over there. Some of them quite dubious, by the way, but we’ll say no more about that,” chortled the Taoiseach, continuing on with his list of achievements.
“All the bragging in the world from you will not change the fact that a quarter of a million people will turn to the St Vincent de Paul this year,” retorted the Sinn Féin leader.
But the repeated comparison of an earlier Sinn Féin policy with anything engineered by former Tory PM Truss rankled. It always does.
The Taoiseach and the Tánaiste have been needling them about this for two years now.
In 2023, Simon Harris, taking Leaders’ Questions on behalf of then-taoiseach Leo Varadkar, told Mary Lou’s stand-in that he was surprised she mentioned energy costs because “Sinn Féin had gone terribly quiet about it”.
He told Sorca Clarke: “Usually, the opposition can stand up and say whatever it wants and we never get to see how it plays out in the real world. Unfortunately for the opposition, Liz Truss became the British prime minister, albeit for a very brief period ...”
“The lettuce,” chirruped his fellow FG minister, Patrick O’Donovan, the brat.
“During that time, I don’t know whether she stole Mary Lou’s homework or Mary Lou stole hers but we ended up in a scenario in which they went ahead and did what Sinn Féin advised and brought in price caps,” said then-minister Harris.
“They bust the country,” chortled O’Donovan.
Two years on and the Government is still playing the Truss card when Sinn Féin lectures it on energy prices.
Micheál’s colleagues found the indignant reactions to his taunts about helping out millionaires highly entertaining.
“I’m glad your benches find that funny and that your would-be successor is grinning like a Cheshire Cat,” noted Mary Lou, as a startled Jim O’Callaghan immediately furrowed his brow.
Because she didn’t.
“I have to tell you I don’t find it funny. I don’t need you to mansplain the economy to me,” she said crisply.
Will he reintroduce energy credits or not?
And what, responded Micheál, give them “to everybody, irrespective of income – millionaires and people on twenty grand”, as Sinn Féin would have it?
It’s a no from him.
Along with a bualadh bos for Truss.
