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The cost-of-living budget Budget 2023 has been billed as a cost-of-living budget, one that aims to tackle soaring energy prices and inflation rates not seen since the 1980s, and as Irish citizens feel the squeeze, the €11 billion package aims to “put money back into their pockets”. Overview The total size of additional spending and tax measures, along with one-off measures, included in Budget 2023 is expected to come close to €11 billion, with the Budget package accounting for approximately €7 billion and one-off measures set to come to almost €4 billion. Such levels of investment, both at the one-off and sustained budgetary package level, were clearly needed to tackle an international economic environment that, on the back of the successive crises of the Covid-19 pandemic and its associated economic damage and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, is being swallowed by steeply increasing inflation, most acutely felt by households via skyrocketing energy prices. The intense nature of these pressures was perhaps reflected in the fact that Budget 2023 was unveiled two weeks earlier than the typical mid-October date. The challenge for Budget 2023 will be to stay ahead of inflation and to not have its increased spending simply swallowed by price raises. Having forecast an inflation rate of 2.2 per cent for 2022 in Budget 2022, the Government is instead facing a rate of inflation forecast to be 7.8 per cent by the Central Bank and forecast by the Department of Finance to be 8.5 per cent for 2022 and 7 per cent for 2023. Such conditions made the cost of living the inescapable priority topic of Budget 2023.
Cost of living Cost-of-living pressures have come from a multitude of directions, applying pressure on citizens from angles such as rent, energy prices, childcare, and social welfare payments not keeping pace with inflationary prices. To this end, Budget 2023 delivered a number
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