“We should have a female minister for finance,” she told the Irish Independent recently during a wide-ranging interview in her Merrion Street office at the Department of Finance.

“If you go down to the portrait room here, where they have the portraits of all the senior ministers, they are all men.

“It’s unnatural that women aren’t represented across the board in every field of Irish life. There has never been a woman minister for finance. I don’t think there has ever been a woman minister for foreign affairs. There has never been a woman Taoiseach. There is something a bit off about all of those things.”

Her frank comments are not unusual from someone who has said in the past that she would not rule out a Fine Gael leadership bid in the future. 

But Leo Varadkar’s job is safe for now, with Carroll MacNeill focused on her financial services brief: persuading insurers to increase their risk appetite, prodding credit unions into more mortgage lending and keeping the banking sector ticking over as it adjusts to a higher interest rate environment.

She believes the current coalition is the steady hand on the tiller that will allow her to do all that, after it survived two Dáil votes called as a result of a growing backlash to its housing policy.

“The number of people that are moving to Ireland to work in Ireland, they need places to live,” she says.

“It is the exact inverse problem to the unemployment crisis and the ghost estates [of 2008]. I’ll never forget unemployment at 16pc and what that did to families, what that did to households, what that did to incomes – what that did to the State’s income.

“We now have the inverse problem.

“Of all the times to be in the Department of Finance, revenues coming in and employment where it is – I don’t want to be trite about it, but it’s a solid day.

“When I travel internationally, whether I’m speaking to politicians or business leaders, we’re talking to really senior people in banks and insurance companies all around the world, and they say to me, ‘How is Ireland doing this?’

“I think a stable political leadership is a big part of a stable economy, and I think when you maybe look at some of the budgetary processes that happened in the UK last year, that was an example of why a good, solid government is a good thing to have.”

The daughter of an engineer-turned-newsagent – her father lost his job in the 1980s downturn before pivoting, very successfully, to retail – Carroll MacNeill grew up in Castleknock working weekends and holidays in her family’s sweet shop and, later, in their bed and breakfast business.

In the early 2000s, she taught English to the German managers of a Mercedes-Benz bus factory in Istanbul, “which is obviously not Constantinople, as you know from the song” she jokes, and saw first-hand how Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan rose to power.

She qualified as a solicitor and barrister after getting a degree in economics and a doctorate in public policy, but the law wasn’t for her. “It was too lonely.”

Instead, she wound up going for a job as a legal adviser to then-Taoiseach Enda Kenny, and went on to advise former ministers including Alan Shatter, Frances Fitzgerald and Eoghan Murphy.

With that CV, Fine Gael was a natural fit and Carroll MacNeill barely had time to settle into her role as a local councillor in 2019 before she was approached by the party to run in the following year’s election.

“I was never a member until they asked me to run. At the same time as I was being ratified as a candidate, I was signing up as a member. I liked Fine Gael. They were pro-European, pro-strong economy, pro-social justice and that was ‘tick, tick, tick’. That’s fine, that’s me.

“I think it was also that my father just despised Charlie Haughey and my mother loved Garret FitzGerald.”

Since becoming TD for Dún Laoghaire and joining the party in 2020, she has quickly risen up the ranks and was plucked from the back benches in the reshuffle last December. In the lead-up to the 2020 election, she was subject to what she called a “terrifying” campaign of harassment by internet troll Gerard Culhane, who sent her sexually explicit videos and messages.

She took a complaint to gardaí at the time and urged other women to do the same.

Although outspoken on matters like that, she chooses her words carefully on policy and deflects questions on recent jitters in the banking market, deferring to Finance Minister Michael McGrath and Eurogroup president Paschal Donohoe on the matter.

“We have been through a period of transition, you might say, from a low interest rate environment to a high interest rate environment, and you can see the impact of that. All of these matters – financial stability matters – are being watched closely.”

She takes a neutral position, too, on the role of vulture funds in Ireland’s mortgage market, saying it is not the Government’s job to intervene to cap interest rates – some as high as 9.25pc – being charged on loans to home owners. According to analysis by Mark Coan of financial advice website MoneySherpa.ie, there are around 60,000 people who can’t move away from vulture funds as they have been in arrears in the past.

The Central Bank, the credit union sector’s regulator, said recently that it had “serious reservations” about regulating interest rates as it could “hinder competition in the market”.

“One of the issues – the most difficult issues – with non-bank lenders that comes to me is the nature of engagement by the non-bank lender with the mortgage holder,” she says, deftly sidestepping questions on whether the State should get involved. 

“It’s things like being able to get somebody on the phone. It’s being able to get a call back. That is the strongest complaint that I get.”

The State’s more than 200 credit unions, she says, should step up mortgage lending instead.

“Many are providing mortgages already, but it could be very substantially higher.”

A recent Central Bank report found that just a quarter of all credit union assets – €5.6bn at the end of last year – is loaned out to members. Total lending is back to pre-pandemic levels but is still close to historical lows.

“What I would like to see is the credit unions taking this opportunity that presents today to move more strongly into the mortgage space, with the assets that they have. The credit unions are the most trusted brand in Ireland. It is really Ireland’s opportunity to have a genuine community bank.”

She is also working, she says, to try to increase the “risk appetite” of insurers and get more players into the Irish market. For those already here, she says a reform of the “duty of care” laws for public liability insurance will be tabled by the Department of Justice “before the summer”.

The heads of bill for a new law on access to cash, promised in the retail banking review, is due in the second half of this year.

It is an ambitious programme for a new politician, who also has a personal life to attend to.

The afternoon we meet, she has just returned from watching her son play a sports match and is straight back to work after our interview. Balancing work and home life is a challenge, she says.

“I have a young child. I know how hard it is, and there is an impact. But it shouldn’t be an unequal impact between men and women, and that’s the problem.”

Very large differences in average pay between men and women, particularly in the legal, accounting and financial sectors, where the gender pay gap is as high as 60pc in some firms, are testament to the penalty women pay for having children.

And time is certainly up on that, Carroll MacNeill insists.

“Take the legal profession: you have more than 50pc of the graduates from the law society, more than 50pc of the intake in different firms, are women. And then they get to a certain point in their career and all of a sudden, the numbers drop off.

“We hear this again and again in the professional services firms and the financial industry. We’ve had long enough. It’s time, now, to just break through it.”