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

People in rural Ireland are very hurt today because they feel that the carbon tax is being increased to provide shiny new buses and other public transport services in Dublin. Those services will not be provided in rural Ireland and we must be realistic about that. If we took all the money out of the Central Bank, we still could not bus the people in rural areas to wherever they need to go every day, whether it be work, school, the mart or anywhere else. Hauliers are outraged. They are saying that the price of oil has driven up the price of tyres and they are already finding it very hard to manage at the present time. School bus operators and other bus operators are also outraged.

Farmers cannot do anything without a tractor. The Minister of State knows that a farmer buys a tractor two or three times in his whole life. There is no such thing as an electric tractor and there will not be for many years. The reality is that tractors use a lot of diesel. It is fine for the Minister for the Environment, Climate and Communications, Deputy Eamon Ryan, to have notions about carbon tax. He has a bicycle and he is a good man on a bicycle but that is it. He will pay nothing in carbon tax. We do not want to go back to the days of horses and donkeys for farmers in rural Ireland but that is where they are being directed with the pressure that is being put on them to survive. I note that there was no talk yesterday about providing a ferryboat to take cattle to France and bypass the UK.

I want to talk about couples being thrown off the housing list. If two parents with three children earn more €33,600, they are removed from the list. In many cases, such couples are in receipt of the working family payment, which is what puts them over the threshold. In the case of the help-to-buy scheme, the cap for a single person is €50,000. That might be reasonable if it were based on net income, but many of these people are paying 50% tax. If they do not qualify for the scheme, they will not be able to buy a house.

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