Election 2024 live updates: Parties continue to try win over voters with polling day in sight

It’s the final weekend of the general election campaigns and party leaders are continuing canvassing voters across the country before polling day on Friday.
Fianna Fáil today will outline their plans for supports for families while Fine Gael will be presenting their ideas in tackling the cost-of-living crisis.
Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald is due to brave Storm Bert as she heads to Limerick, Cork and Kerry too.
Follow our updates below throughout the day for all the happenings on the campaign trail.
Simon Harris has apologised after his encounter with a carer in Kanturk admitting that he should have spent more time engaging with her.
The meeting typifies Fine Gael’s attitude to those employed in the community and voluntary sector, Sinn Féin believes.
Sinn Féin spokesperson on Workers’ Rights, Louise O’Reilly said health and community workers employed in community and voluntary sector agencies have been fighting for pay equality for years.
“These workers are essential in providing healthcare and services for people with disabilities on behalf of the state and they have been badly let down by Fine Gael for the last 14 years,” he said.
“It’s time to respect these workers and pay them properly. The failure to do so not only involved pay inequality, it is resulting in a huge turnover in these staff and ongoing difficulties in recruiting much needed staff.”
Labour has launched its plan to support carers – an issue which has come to the forefront of the election after Simon Harris’s confrontation with a carer yesterday.
Labour’s new Social Contract for Care will abolish the means test for the carer’s allowance if elected to Government.
They would also gradually increase the half-rate carer’s Allowance, recognising the invaluable contribution of carers, starting with pensioners.
Fine Gael deputy leader Helen McEntee says her boss should have spent more time with the woman in Kanturk.
But she defended Simon Harris’s meeting with a voter who accused him of not caring about carers.
He got into politics because of the lack of disability services, she said and is committed to improving them if re-elected to office.
Sinn Féin’s manifesto proposal to establish an “independent human rights and journalist expert review into the objectivity of coverage by RTÉ of the Israeli genocide in Gaza and other international conflicts” has drawn a strong rebuke in this Irish Times editorial.
“And if it can do so over Gaza, it presumably believes it can do the same over coverage of domestic issues. That would be an outrageous breach of fundamental principles.”
You can read the editorial here.
Ireland is a rich country no matter what any of the opposition parties say to the contrary, writes David McWilliams.
There are big challenges ahead and we risk repeating the mistakes of 2004-2007 when there was a series of giveaway budgets before the economy collapse.
You can read his column here.
Will Simon Harris’s meeting with a carer in Kanturk be his Gordon Brown moment?
Political anoracks will recall during the 2010 British general election, Brown was confronted by a woman in Rochdale named Gillian Duffy.
She questioned why she was being taxed at the age of 66 and what he was going to do about the debt.
She also confronted him about immigration and the influx of Eastern Europeans into the UK then.
It would have been forgotten about but for the fact that he still had his Sky News microphone on him which picked up his comments when he got back into his car.
“That was a disaster – they should never have put me with that woman. Whose idea was that? Ridiculous.”
Asked what she had said, he replied: “Everything, she was just a bigoted woman.”
The clip was picked up and went viral. It seemed to confirm to voters traits of Brown’s personality that they didn’t like.
Will the same happen here? Harris has quickly moved to apologise to the woman in Kanturk and to reiterate his commitment to addressing disability issues, but will it be enough?
Taoiseach Simon Harris has said he “feels really bad” about an exchange he had with a visibly upset woman in Kanturk on the general election campaign trail, where he denied claims that the disability sector had been ignored, Jennifer Bray reports.
Speaking on Saturday morning, Mr Harris apologised to the woman after the clip, recorded by RTÉ News, was widely shared on Friday night.
The Taoiseach made his comments on Instagram on Saturday morning, saying: “One of the reasons I got involved in politics, in fact the reason I got involved in politics, is disability services. I wouldn’t be a politician, or certainly a politician at such a young age, was my brother not born with autism, did I not see the struggle my parents, particularly my mother, went through in trying to fight for services and answers and the loneliness that my family often felt as well.”
Read more here.