Dáil debates

Wednesday, 14 October 2020

Financial Resolutions 2020 - Financial Resolution No. 7: General (Resumed)

 

3:45 pm

Photo of Michael Healy-RaeMichael Healy-Rae (Kerry, Independent) | Oireachtas source

We should remember one thing when we are talking about carbon tax. At this exact moment, if a person living in a local authority house in County Kerry finds that the heating is broken, the council does not have the money or wherewithal to repair it. That is outrageous and it is not the fault of the council or its housing department. If the same thing happened in the private sector, a landlord could not claim an inability to pay because he or she did not have the money in the kitty. This is a real problem. We are talking about imposing carbon tax on people at a time when local authorities cannot afford to make repairs to houses in which tenants are living. That issue needs to be addressed immediately.

This is the Green Party's budget and the other Government parties fell in behind it last night and lauded it as a great success. In the future, when members of those parties are knocking on people's doors, when the effect of €1 billion a year in additional carbon tax charges has hit home, when the Government has closed down Bord na Móna and stopped people from cutting turf, when the State has married us to one source of energy, that being ESB or something like it, then the people will realise it was the other two parties of government which let all of that happen on their watch and that they blindly followed the Green Party just for power. The other two parties in government have sold their souls to the Green Party, its policies, aims and idealistic view on life, just to get power.

We have to talk about the here and now. We need to talk about the women and men who will be trying to balance a budget this coming Friday, pay for the cost of living and educate their children. Many parents of third level students have paid thousands of euro for accommodation which their children cannot avail of because the colleges are closed down. These are the real problems people are facing at this time. In response, the Government is coming along with airy-fairy ideas of raising billions of euro in additional carbon taxes. It is totally out of order.

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