Mattie McGrath (Tipperary, Independent) | Oireachtas source

-----shopping trolleys were filled up to the water level with goods in that Dunnes Stores outlet. The whole lot came to €16 or €18. It was shocking. There were loss leader products, and all these types of things. The companies are getting the money back in other ways, but they are selling all these things by way of champion products and below cost selling. It is shocking. I refer to the position in which they are putting the ordinary shopkeepers, the fear gnó or bean gnó. Those shopkeepers look after the people when raffles are being held for the GAA or for other fund-raisers, such as when people are sick. They are the first people to give spot prizes.

They have been trodden on. I said it this morning. All the globalists. It is a globalist policy, and we are denuding our country of expertise in business. I see today now I will be attacked for saying it as an employer myself. I called about it and they said now we are going to give an extra 12 days' sick leave. How are small business clinging on? The Minister of State should know this. They are hanging on by their fingernails after Covid. It is one scheme or promise after another but they are all heaped on top of these people who cannot afford to pay them and they will be doomed to shut, gone out of business. It is fine to have all the promises then. Is everybody going to be on an unemployment register? We cannot manage that.

We have the beef cartels. Some of them were bailed out in bygone days and they got away but they are back now and they are not helpful to anybody. Insurance, my goodness, what a racket and the carry-on. We hear every day of the week on different radio programmes about shopping around and elderly people and all kind of penalties and loading. That is not a fair crack of the whip for anybody whether young, daoine óga or daoine aosta. There is no fairness at all in the system and we have an insurance regulator. We have a regulator set for everything now, everything.

The eTenders is the biggest load of baloney as well; certain levels of the tender are at EU level. I have a community now in my county who were successful and did great work. It is a wonderful community shop and enterprise, and they got grant aid before Covid but now the prices are doubled and trebled and they cannot do the work on that kind of funding. Now they want to know, ní neart go cur le chéile, they want a meitheal. They want to do it themselves, overseen obviously by the Department and by a local engineer and architects. They cannot get around it. They are killing the spirit of the people. The spirit of the Irish people has been magnificent and the spirit of the meitheal has been magnificent throughout our country with neighbours helping out and doing barter arrangements where they can. eTenders is another way to kill small businesses. Someone has to have so many builds in the bank to apply, including contractors and everything else; you have the whole works.

I refer to transport and the cartels that are there and the price of fuel now. I am talking about the National Transport Authority, NTA, now and bus transport. We have JJ Kavanagh's whom I salute and many other small operators in my county. They are being squeezed and squeezed and squeezed until there is nothing left to squeeze. Every last drop of blood will be squeezed out of them. We have empty coaches. Outside the door here are double decker buses up and down the street one after the other and níl duine amháin istigh sa bhus; a lot of them have no one inside of them, but no problem, this is Dublin and we can have anything we like.

I mentioned also the whole situation with fertiliser. Denmark, Sweden, France and all the other countries have intervened in the pig industry in the EU and they are allowed to. The EU Commissioner was before the committee. Deputy Michael Collins was there and he heard that the Irish Government can intervene and subsidise this. If it does not subsidise the fertiliser for farmers, the foodstuff is going to be more expensive for mom's purse, as Deputy Healy-Rae phrased it, on a Friday evening. It is as simple as that.

Everything is gone the same way. We have regulators for everything. We need someone to get in and regulate these regulators and put them on a training course and make them understand what their job and their role is. An awful lot of them are political hacks and they are in there creaming it off. They are putting people to the pin of their collar.

I also mentioned the loss leaders in the supermarkets. These are punishing the small shops. Since the pandemic there is not a small shop left in the capital. Some of them are gone in the country. Look at An Post and the telephone network. I saw Albert Reynolds at an Ard Fheis once waving a phone. Everyone had a phone in their house in a month. Now we wait maybe two years to get a phone and we wait five or six months to get it repaired. Elderly people are waiting for hours on the phone. Customer service is appalling in some of those big companies and there are the monopolies again. It is shocking the way we are treating our people.

I said today they are waiting in the long grass. There is a lot of long grass this year because it has been a mild winter but it will be grazed fairly bare. The Government will have no place to hide when the election comes because it will be laid out bare naked and the people can see it.

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