Mattie McGrath (Tipperary, Independent) | Oireachtas source

The genie is out of the bottle. The Government is screwing the people with tax. I will not repeat what has been said, but a person with no education could see it. Tax receipts are booming because the Government has added more tax - carbon tax, extra VAT and everything else. It plays games with money, moving it around here and there like in a game of Monopoly, trying to cod the people.

I salute the community welfare officers and the social welfare officers who work so hard trying to deal with people. I do not accept the flippant words from a senior Minister one day, when he said, "Let them go to the community welfare officer." First, they have been removed from the country areas. You have to find them in the towns now. The Government is penalising the people every which way they turn.

There are two things wrong with this. One is that the Government is taking its orders from Europe or the World Economic Forum, WEF, or wherever else. The second is that Government Deputies are not upholding their duty as elected Teachtaí Dála or the mandate of the Government to serve the people of Ireland. They are not serving them. They have refused to cap the prices charged by the ESB and the gas companies. They have refused for ages to change the toolbox they had from Europe whereby they were charging us all the same price for smelly oil as they were for wind energy. That was another trick. That changed last October, but still the prices have not come down and the massive profits go on. The Government is beholden to big conglomerates every minute of every hour of every day, 24-7. That is what it is doing. It is not representing the people of rural Ireland.

It has all these ideas such as climate change. You cannot go into any town or village now. They are like airport runways with footpaths the width of half this Chamber. It is such a mockery, with dirty, rotten concrete, and you cannot get money to spend on a bridge. A bridge in Ardfinnan, in my constituency, has been operating according to a one-way system for the past six or seven years, and then there is active travel or whatever the Government wants to call it. What do you do when you end up with no active travel? The people were walking before and they will walk again. Yet they will give Government Deputies their walking boots, their marching boots and their running boots, and there will be no hiding place for those Deputies. The long grass will not be there to hide them either, so it will be a case of off with ye - ye have done too much damage.

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