Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú) | Oireachtas source

Families throughout Ireland are being hammered by rising costs. The prices of rent, childcare and food are rising significantly. This increase is happening to the people who probably suffered most during Covid. Many people have lost their jobs and have had their incomes decrease significantly because of Covid. On top of this, energy and fuel prices are going sky high. The facts are startling. Ireland has the highest electricity prices in Europe and is the 21st most expensive country in the world for petrol. Diesel prices are up more than 24%. The wholesale price of natural gas has surged by 251% since the start of this year.

These increases are hammering rural Ireland, in particular. I do not believe that this is by accident. Fine Gael and the Green Party are Dublin-centric parties that are mainly in large urban areas. They do not have the feedback they should have from people living in rural areas. Fianna Fáil is rolling over in this regard in a big way. The Government is not standing idly by, but is actually adding to the problem. Consider the issue of the carbon tax. How can the Government design a tax today that can be implemented six, seven and eight years hence without understanding the circumstances of people six, seven and eight years hence? Surely that is a blind way of implementing a tax. It is a dangerous and damaging way to do it. Aontú has produced an amendment that will hopefully go into the Finance Bill which would put a ceiling on the carbon tax plus market price effect on the end price of fuel. It would have the objective of pushing people away from fossil fuels without scalding them economically to do that.

The other issue is that the Government is seeking to push people away from fossil fuel without providing alternatives in much of Ireland. The electric car is still too dear and charging points do not exist in rural Ireland. The bus service in many towns and villages in this country is absolutely rubbish. There are towns and villages in my constituency that have no bus service or where a bus rolls in at 7 a..m. and perhaps again at 8 p.m. Yesterday in County Meath, the information came through that the rail line between Navan and Dublin which has been promised for years, as long ago as when Mr. Noel Dempsey was the Minister, is being put on the long finger again. This morning the majority of Meath workers left the county to go to work. It happens nowhere else in Ireland. Navan is the largest town in the country without a rail line and plans by this Government to build a rail line are for 2040 to 2050, which is really never-never land where the Government can say that it is in the plan but never has to deliver it.

The manner in which the Government is engaging with people with regard to building a proper energy system is incredible as well. We have seen it when it comes to the pylons the Government is seeking to build in my constituency. It is seeking to build 409 pylons of up to 51 m carrying 400,000 volts through Meath, Cavan, Monaghan, Armagh and Tyrone, with a minimum distance of 13 m from people's homes. There has been massive opposition since 2008. People have agreed that they would like it to be underground, but the Government will not do that. This week, we learned that EirGrid and the ESB have secretly intruded onto landowners' properties without notice to, or permission from, those landowners. I understand that EirGrid and ESB staff told landowners that the reason for trespassing was that they were studying bats and bees, while at the same time digging holes for pylons. It is incredible. In some cases, the management of EirGrid is offering thousands of euro to farmers to let it onto the land. The Government does not have a policy for the development of a proper infrastructure for energy in this country at a reasonable price. As a result, the people of Ireland are getting salted by its policies.

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