Danny Healy-Rae (Kerry, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am glad to have an opportunity to speak on this very serious matter this evening. As I have stated several times, this proposal claims to be about national oil reserves or whatever but it is about raising carbon taxes and increasing the amount the ordinary punter will have to pay. The ordinary motorist, farmer, haulier and bus operator will have to pay more. All of those sectors will have to pay a sum to provide a shiny new fleet of electric buses for Dublin. Rural Ireland is being asked to pay for that.

I should have congratulated the Minister of State and wished him well in his new post but I will not support or vote for this Bill tomorrow evening. I will vote against it. In trying to come up to the mark and obey the rules that will pertain, people are trying to make electric excavators.

The fact is that they have made them already but they have to charge them all night with diesel generators. What is going on is absolutely ridiculous.

There is talk about electric cars but already the price for charging them has gone up. The cost of travelling 100 km in an electric car is €3.80 compared to €5 for a small diesel car, but we must take into account the cost of an electric car. Where will people charge electric cars? Where will they plug in an electric car to recharge when it stops? There is no place to plug it in. All of these things will cost people in rural Ireland because one cannot get anywhere there without a car and farmers cannot do anything without a jeep or a tractor. The Government had better realise that. What will this do only hurt the old people, who for one reason or another cannot cut turf any longer? What has been happening is wrong. Traditionally, we cut turf all around the county of Kerry to keep ourselves warm and we will keep doing that while we can but the Green Party does not want us to do that. It is wrong to make people do things or not do things that they have been doing for generations.

The Green Party is promoting public transport. In the past ten to 15 weeks, I only saw one or two people inside in the 51-seater or 52-seater buses and coaches. A massive Luas passed me the other day with only two people inside it. We are told to use public transport. That is what the Green Party is saying. At the same time, we are looking at advertisements on the television every night telling us not to use public transport, if at all possible. There is a complete contradiction there. I want the Minister of State to know something I have said several times: if we put out the lights altogether in this country and each and every one of us left, it would only make 0.13% of a difference in the worldwide context. There are other continents and big powers doing nothing at all about climate change.

I wish to speak about criticism of farmers and methane gas. The scientist who argued that farmers were creating so much methane gas emissions has now come along and said that he was two thirds wrong in his estimation. The Minister of State must be honest with people about what the Government is trying to do. People rang me from around the country tonight even from as far away as Kerry and Donegal about the problems that we have in rural Ireland. Rural pubs are being denied the right to open their doors while two thirds of pubs are wide open here in Dublin. The Government is hitting rural Ireland again. This is what the Bill is all about.

See this speech in context