It was the summer of 2024 and the rotors of State machinery were turning towards that year’s pre-election budget – the first under the management of newly minted minister for finance Jack Chambers.
The then 33-year-old Dublin West TD had just become the youngest person to assume one of the most important jobs in politics since 28-year-old revolutionary Michael Collins got the job in the 1919 Dáil.
Chambers, who said he wanted to be a “contrarian” finance minister when interviewed by podcaster Sean O’Rourke in May this year, was described by some involved in crafting the October 2024 budget as being harshly critical of the State’s spending system and adopting an ideologue’s zeal for reform.
Experienced budget architects were taken aback by what they described as a “gung-ho” and “bombastic” tone from Chambers in some of his earliest budget-planning meetings with then minister for public expenditure Paschal Donohoe.
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Chambers was the surprise successor to outgoing Fianna Fáil minister Michael McGrath just weeks before the 2024 summer economic statement.
The bond between McGrath and Donohoe had been forged during the confidence and supply agreement from 2016 between their two parties, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael.
The relationship formed the central axis of the Fianna Fáil-Fine Gael coalitions, rooted in a belief in the economic case for a centre that holds. A former colleague says Donohoe was “very conscious that the two economic ministers needed to make it work – if they didn’t, the centre didn’t hold”.
Some in Government worried whether Chambers would trust Donohoe, his budget partner as minister for public expenditure, as instinctively as McGrath had.
By 2025, when Chambers and Donohoe had swapped roles, the Fianna Fáil Minister, now in charge of public expenditure and reform, had become a more considered politician, according to those working on the budget; he remained obsessed with reform, but seemed more accepting of the practical political reality of dealing with the system’s flaws.
Even with the considerable distraction of his party’s abortive presidential run and his role as director of elections for Jim Gavin’s disastrous campaign, Chambers had nurtured a stronger relationship with Donohoe for Budget 2026. A senior official who worked with them at the time says they each subscribed to the same idea: “If it doesn’t work between them, Government doesn’t work at all.”
Now the dynamic – and the personnel – have changed again, as Chambers prepares to agree a budget with first-time Minister for Finance Simon Harris.
Political commentators have queried whether Harris is too preoccupied with his polling numbers to preserve the Coalition’s most important alliance. Such concerns seem, so far, to be misplaced. Sources within both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael say while it took some adjustment, Harris and Chambers get along better than they were expected to. It turns out that these young money Ministers are two sides of the same coin.
Though mithered by commentary about his lack of economic qualifications, a raven-haired Harris first attracted political attention as a fiscal hawk when he was appointed to the public accounts committee as a newly elected Fine Gael TD in 2011.
Using the same retail politics vernacular he relies on today, Harris sought to skewer witnesses in plain terms. In one exchange, the millennial told health officials before the committee to “chillax”, prompting Enda Kenny to admit on the Dáil floor the next day that he had never heard the word before.
Like Harris, Chambers’s ability to master a brief marked him out early. Fine Gael ministers first noticed Chambers during the 2020 government formation talks, and continued to pay attention to him when he started attending Cabinet as chief whip soon after.
While Harris’s naked political ambition is clear from his obvious drive and ascent in Government, Chambers’s tenacity to get ahead is equally as fierce, according to colleagues around him, though less commented upon by outside commentators or analysts.
At constituency level, the Fianna Fáil TD runs an almost industrial system for responding to constituents and has on occasion canvassed three times a day, even outside of election time.
One experienced campaigner in his Dublin West constituency described Chambers as “the most focused person I’ve ever met, and that’s not necessarily a compliment” – a reference to his tunnel vision.
Harris and Chambers are, combined, 50 years younger than Michael Noonan and Brendan Howlin were when they became the first public expenditure and finance ministers to deliver Budget 2012.
The current Ministers both ascended the political ladder at such a pace that promotions to Cabinet raised eyebrows when 29-year-old Harris became minister for health in 2016 and Chambers was promoted to minister of finance and deputy leader of Fianna Fáil in 2024.
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But they had put in early groundwork; they each had ministerial roles to travel around the country and build a national presence and profile, Harris as minister for higher education and Chambers as a junior sports minister.
The two politicians share similar pastimes.
Chambers, a frequent gym user, will often leave Leinster House straight after a vote on Wednesday evening to spend the rest of the night training.
In the last couple of years, Harris has taken up running.
While critics accuse Chambers and Harris of being sensitive to criticism, kinder colleagues say they are responsive to it.
They point to the time when Chambers was criticised in July 2020 for his lack of fluency in Irish after he became junior minister for the Gaeltacht, but he then became more committed to speaking Irish. Harris, who takes communications seriously, can be defensive in the face of negative media coverage.
Chambers, a Belvedere boy born in Galway to Mayo parents but raised in Castleknock, hailed from an inherently political home where current affairs was a kitchen-table topic and Civil War politics were argued out between his maternal Fine Gael and paternal Fianna Fáil families.
One of his most formative political experiences came at the age of 20, when he canvassed for family friend and former minister for finance Brian Lenihan jnr in the February 2011 general election.
Lenihan was the only Fianna Fáil TD in Dublin re-elected by an angry electorate in the wake of the economic crash. Chambers internalised this as a lesson about doing right by the country rather than the party.
In 2014, as a local councillor and aspirant TD, Chambers reopened Lenihan’s old constituency office above a Chinese takeaway in the Laurel Lodge Shopping Centre in Castleknock – the same one that thousands attended to sign a book of condolences when Lenihan died in June 2011. When Chambers eventually became finance minister, he kept a picture of Lenihan in his office.
The same 2011 election that was so seminal politically for Chambers also sent Harris to the Dáil for the first time, representing Wicklow. At 24, he was the youngest elected that term.
Harris, who as a councillor was concerned that Fine Gael had become a permanent party of opposition, has never sat on the opposition benches in the Dáil. He is now the longest consecutively serving minister at Cabinet, with a decade’s experience.
Neither Chambers nor Harris has ever had a job outside of politics. Harris is the more natural communicator of the two; Chambers has had to work to sound less wooden in his TV and radio appearances over the last five years.
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Chambers’s current office is now one floor above Harris’s. The pair have what colleagues say is a good working relationship, despite their dyed-in-the-wool party allegiances. Chambers is as Fianna Fáil as Harris is Fine Gael, but they act in concord on economics.
Chambers – a fan of abundance liberalism, as made popular in the book Abundance by US commentators Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson – is critical of what he calls an obsession with “additionality” of spending: increasing expenditure in budgets every year rather than looking for efficiency and reform.
Harris, who said in a speech at the Economic and Social Research Institute last month that he was “taken” by the central argument of the same book, talks in plainer terms about how Ireland’s problems cannot be simply solved by spending money.
Theresa Reidy, a professor in the department of government and politics at University College Cork, says “political ambition” matters to Harris and Chambers but “the nature of their departments means that close co-operation is important”.
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“Even if they didn’t like each other, and there is every reason to believe that they do like each other, they have to co-operate. Their success depends on each other,” she says.
“You don’t mind being unpopular?” RTÉ broadcaster David McCullagh asked Chambers in an interview last week, in advance of what might be the tightest budget since before the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Absolutely not, no,” Chambers said.
Across Government, Chambers has been nicknamed “Dr No” and “Jack Thatcher” for his parsimonious ways. He does not appear to care, according to those who know him. His team would prefer if Chambers was more strongly associated with politically unpopular measures, like the levy he imposed on all departments for the €600 million overspend in the Department of Education.
Those close to Harris insist the Tánaiste defends Chambers in meetings with aggrieved Fine Gael Ministers who feel the Fianna Fáil spending Minister is penny pinching.
One source close to Harris says they think he has a better relationship with Chambers than with Taoiseach Micheál Martin, leader of his Government partner Fianna Fáil.
Coalition budgets are usually negotiated in teams of two: sometimes the money Ministers team up to pitch or ditch a measure to the two party leaders; on other occasions the Fianna Fáil leader and Minister back each other up against their Fine Gael counterparts.
Now, this dynamic is playing out with just three people, with Harris now serving as both a party leader and Minister for Finance.
“Jack, to his credit, recognises that Harris has two jobs,” one Fine Gael source says.
For weeks, the Tánaiste has been posting videos and blogs talking up Budget 2027 and even asking people for their own ideas, especially on the issues of fuel and childcare.
One Cabinet colleague described how Harris doesn’t just have to agree the budget, “he has to sell it for us”.
Next week, the Minister for Finance will find out if the public will buy it.
