Michael Collins (Cork South West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

That is fine. I am saying that it is a 50% increase. That is all I saw in the document that came out yesterday. I have moved on from that to the next issue. The Minister of State has a right to reply later, but I am giving him the facts about public transport for young people. If it is the case that PSO routes are not included, this will disqualify most areas in rural Ireland. It will of course not disqualify anyone who wants to take a Luas or DART. Of course we will look after all of those people, but I am afraid that in rural Ireland we do not have a Luas or DART. We do not have a public transport service. We are talking about it, but we certainly do not have Luas or DART services. The 50% deduction for young people has a sting in the tail which has to be rectified.

A private operator in west Cork takes 70% of the young people from west Cork to college, which is great. He will have not benefited in any way from yesterday's budget. When he started the route last year he paid €110 every time he went to Cork. He is now paying €165 for the same trip due to the carbon tax. The Government is going to put him out of business and put more cars back on the road. That is exactly what it is doing. It is so removed from reality. It is quite happy to be smug and say that we are talking bonkers. These are the facts. The Government should talk to the people on the ground and they will tell it the facts. The operator to whom I refer to cannot qualify for the cut in the budget even though he is bringing 70% of the young people from west Cork to college. What is wrong with the young people of west Cork? They have the equal right to travel as somebody living in Dublin or any other part of the country has and should be equally looked after. The Minister, Deputy Eamon Ryan, has created a real mess which needs to be rectified immediately because it is an anti-rural budget.

The problem is that Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil Deputies are no longer able to talk around the table. They are sound asleep and the Green Party is wagging the tail. I will tell them one thing. Deputies will listen to the people when they go to the doors because they will not let this go. Every farm organisation is furious with the budget. It is a complete and utter let-down for the people.

Carbon tax is a simple attack on the people of rural Ireland so that we can buy fleets of buses and beautiful DART carriages and every delivery that Dublin needs. Ireland needs that. I have said for long enough that we cannot carry Dublin on our back. This is what is happening. The Government is allowing it to happen. The good people from long ago in Fianna Fáil fought for their people and the good people of Fine Gael are turning in their graves today. I ask Deputies to get up and speak on behalf of the people, and to stop being asleep behind the wheel and backing the Green Party in government until it takes us to the edge.

Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil Deputies are outside today with the people affected by the peat moss crisis. Who created the crisis? It was the Government that is here. The poor people involved in forestry are going out of business. We are importing everything to keep the Green Party happy. I was at a funeral in Castletownbere the other day and Colombian briquettes were for sale. What a farcical situation. In the name of God almighty, what is wrong with the Government? Would it come out of the fog? We have fine briquettes in our country. We should be proud to have them and not to be importing them. We should not worry about the carbon footprint. The Green Party is happy as long as it can tell its buddies across the world that we do not make them, but they are being sold here. The Green Party wants to be able to say there is no need to worry because we do not make peat moss any more, but where is the peat moss coming from? It is coming from Latvia. Well done, lads. Pat yourselves on the back. You are real heroes. I can tell you this will not be forgotten.

Car fuel prices for ordinary men and women who work hard every day of the week are going through the roof. People are stopping at filling stations today and scratching the backs of their heads. Working men and women are being crucified in rural Ireland. They are telling me they are furious. I do not know what they think of the Government. That is why the Government is going one way and one way only in the polls. It is stuck at the bottom and cannot come off it, and cannot understand why. I will give the Government ten minutes and tell it the whole story. Common sense has gone out the window. The Green Party is wagging the tail. If the Government does not stop it from wagging the tail, it will wag the Government out over the edge. It is doing it as we speak.

Ordinary men and women are trying to heat their homes with oil. There is no alternative in the wide earthly world. As the Minister of State knows, in his constituency, as well as in mine, there is a two-year wait for the warmer homes scheme, if people are lucky. The wait could be two and a half years. That is a scandalous situation. As Deputy Naughten said, there is a lesser budget than what should have been put into the warmer homes scheme. People want to use an alternative, but it is not there. If the alternative was there I would sit here and say nothing, but there is no alternative. It is either that or go cold. People want to fill their oil tanks. I spoke to oil distributors yesterday who were getting frantic phone calls from people who were trying to buy oil. They will get caught the next time. The price of coal has gone through the roof. What is the alternative? Is it not to light a fire or to fill it full of paper? For the love of God, what is wrong with the Government?

I spoke to an agricultural contractor today. The Government should speak to such contractors, as well as lorry and bus drivers. The Government should be worried because they are in every constituency. The Government hopes another two or three years will turn this around.

It is worse it will get.

Yesterday there was a different comment from most agricultural organisations I heard, including the Irish Farmers Association, IFA; the Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers Association, ICMSA; and Macra na Feirme. "Baffled" was the word. There was zero delivery - zero - on what they asked for and what they knew, and they know because they have their fingers on the pulse. The Government cannot deny they do. They meet with the organisations every day of the week.

We can have similar payments to what we had before. We need a new kind of rural environment protection scheme, REPS, opened up. We need definite deliveries, not non-deliveries, which is what is happening at the moment. The Government has created a massive, unresolvable urban-rural divide instead of bridging the gap and working towards both urban and rural working together. There is no togetherness. They have gone so far apart that there is no mending, unless this Government is removed. That is the only way we have in this country, unfortunately. Nobody wants an election. I speak to many people about that. They are very annoyed. A budget like this creates a massive divide.

We in the Rural Independent Group put forward our own submissions. We called for rural-proofing of the budget. There is no rural-proofing. There is nothing rural in the budget. It is anti-rural-proofing the Government has done. That has left us in a very difficult situation. It is easy for me. I can go back to my constituency and I will say I have fought my corner. I will fight the corner for the people who tell me what is wrong, the people who will be at my clinics this weekend and the people who will ring my phone. People are furious with the way they have been treated and let down. A certain sector of society, and it happens to be the people of rural Ireland, is being hit hard. This is in the hands of Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil. They can stop this. They can stop the Green Party wagging the tail, start kicking up around the Cabinet table and start kicking for rural Ireland and put it first and foremost. If they do not do that, they will never be forgotten for what they do.

What did the fishermen get in this budget? Zilch. What did the Government do to the fishermen? It ruined their incomes. The Minister of State knows it did. He can say what he wants. It is quite plain to see. The Government put the whole fishing industry and its future in the hands of Michel Barnier and he looked after France and said, "To hell with ye, Ireland." He codded the Government to its eyeballs. In the run-up to this I told the Taoiseach, Deputy Micheál Martin, and Deputy Varadkar at the tail end of his being Taoiseach before that, not to leave this in the hands of a Frenchman and to make sure to have an Irish Minister out there fighting for the Irish people. They failed shockingly and, now that they have finished, the Government cannot cut €43 million off a budget and tell me nothing is wrong.

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