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YOU MAY HAVE thought the phrase “people who get up early in the morning” was confined to the history books of 2017, but Simon Harris has dusted it off this week and brought it back into use.

Seemingly unfazed by the blowback Leo Varadkar got when he used it, the Tánaiste has said this year’s budget will prioritise helping this group of people.

In the run-up to the publication this week of the Summer Economic Statement – the document that sets out the spending parameters for the forthcoming budget – Harris did a blitz of press interviews, outlining his plans for his first budget as finance minister.

“Sometimes people call them people who get up early in the morning. Sometimes people call them middle Ireland. Sometimes people call them the squeezed middle. We know who they are,” Harris told the Mail on Sunday.

“They have to be the priority. Work has to pay; it has to be rewarded,” he said.

Harris’s language, and his promise to reduce income tax for middle earners, marks a return to a quintessentially Fine Gael approach to the economy that was absent in last year’s package, when the focus was largely on supporting hospitality businesses via the 9% VAT cut and there were no changes to income tax bands.

It is a subtle shift in stated priorities from Harris, who had spent the early days of his Fine Gael leadership saying that his overarching goal is to make Ireland the best country in the world in which to be a child.

Such aspirations were notably absent from his remarks at the launch of the Summer Economic Statement (SES) on Wednesday.

Perhaps buoyed by Fine Gael’s recent favourable position in opinion polls, the Fine Gael leader delivered a message that the €1.5 billion tax package in Budget 2027 will be ”skewed towards helping working people to keep more of their own income”.

“This is one of the best ways the government can help people with the cost of living pressures that they’re facing,” he told reporters at the publication of the SES.

“More broadly, this government is an advocate for the principle of making work pay, and indeed rewarding work and effort is one of the pillars on which Budget 2027 will be framed.”

How exactly this will be done won’t be fully revealed until budget day on 6 October, but for now Harris has hinted that it will be done via a combination of changes to tax bands and tax credits.

He also signalled that the cost-of-living packages that we have seen in recent years are off the table and that rather than supporting people via one-off payments or allowances, he favours longer-term measures, like lowering the cost of childcare and raising the entry point to the higher rate of income tax.

Criticism of the approach was swift and sharp.

Social Justice Ireland noted that the SES gave little to no detail on how the government plans to close the ever-widening income gaps between well-off and poorer households and warned that this risks “embedding inequality into our society and fails to protect vulnerable households”.

Less than a month ago, the Oireachtas Committee on Children published a report on child poverty which found that despite Ireland’s economic growth, child poverty remains one of Ireland’s most pressing social challenges.

It noted that while poverty affects children across society, certain groups are disproportionately impacted, with children living in lone-parent households, households affected by disability and larger families facing significantly higher risks of poverty.

The committee recommended that housing stability and food security should be prioritised as prerequisites for other interventions to support children in poverty.

With 95,000 children in the State found recently to be growing up in consistent poverty, the Children’s Rights Alliance has called for an increase in children’s income payments and the fuel allowance in this year’s budget.

Speaking to RTÉ’s Morning Ireland last month, head of the Alliance, Tanya Ward said: “These are children that don’t go to birthday parties because they can’t afford the present.

“These are children that arrive in school in September and don’t have a warm coat or a new pair of shoes, something that most children can expect to have.”

She added: “We have more children now at risk of poverty, we cannot be investing less.”

With over two months to go until Budget Day, perhaps the Tánaiste is keeping his cards close to his chest, but his recent remarks about prioritising the “squeezed middle” would leave you wondering how much room will be left for the children on the margins.

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