Budget 2025 will be this Coalition’s last big political set-piece, and could very well set the mood for the pending general election. For Government parties, the stakes are high.
For the new Minister for Finance Jack Chambers, they are even higher. Chambers, who has been a TD since 2016, will deliver his first budget on the floor of the Dáil on Tuesday afternoon knowing that he carries a significant chunk of Fianna Fáil’s electoral hopes on his shoulders.
His own leadership ambitions – and he is viewed as a possible successor to current leader Micheál Martin – must also be at the back of his mind. One of the most important jobs he had in the immediate weeks after his election as Minister for Finance was to establish a close working relationship with Minister for Public Expenditure Paschal Donohoe. It appears that he has done that.
Chambers has also been busy in recent months getting the wheels turning for Budget 2025. Other than a now-resolved spat over the residential zoned land tax, he has mostly kept his head down. But who is Jack Chambers and what does he stand for?
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Born in Galway, he grew up mainly in Dublin and was educated at Belvedere College. He has a law and political science degree from Trinity College. He then spent some time studying medicine at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland but took a break to become a politician. He eventually graduated from the Royal College of Surgeons, becoming a qualified medical doctor in 2020.
He first topped the poll for the Castleknock electoral area in the 2014 local elections. That same year, he reopened the constituency office closed after the death of Brian Lenihan in 2011. He went on to become the youngest TD of the last Dáil in 2016, and then became the party’s spokesman on defence.
He served as chief whip between 2020-2022, when Mr Martin was in the Taoiseach’s office. He impressed Mr Martin during this period, and later became a super-junior minister at the Department of Transport, sitting at Cabinet.
His role as director of elections for this summer’s local elections campaign, where Fianna Fáil emerged (just about) as the largest party of local Government once again, reinforced his standing with the party leadership and paved the way for his elevation to a senior Cabinet position and his appointment as deputy leader of Fianna Fáil.
In 2018, Mr Chambers was one of a number of Fianna Fáil TDs who called for a No vote in the referendum on the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution. In 2022, he said his position on abortion had “evolved” and he now supported women being able to get terminations up to 12 weeks of pregnancy in all circumstances. In January of this year, he came out as gay.
