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

My colleagues and I are very glad to be able to bring this important motion before the House. It must be particularly upsetting for the Minister, Deputy McConalogue, to have to come in here and try to defend the indefensible. Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, the Green Party and, indeed, many Deputies on this side of the House who supported measures such as carbon taxes are now waking up because they are hearing it on the doorsteps. They are hearing that the people are feeling the brunt of what the Government has done to them. They are seeing exactly what the carbon taxes are going to do to them.

Rural communities and Irish farmers are facing crippling costs for feed, fertiliser and fuel, which has the potential to wipe out many viable farms. The cost of living crisis is placing crippling financial pressures on all lower income earners, whom the Government have abandoned, including pensioners, struggling mortgage holders, the unemployed, rural residents and farmers, all of whom have been feeling the deep impact of prices spiralling upwards over the past year. There are more increases coming in May thanks to Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, the Green Party and all of the people who supported them. Many of them were over on the Labour Party side, and when they woke up now and then, they told the Government that it was not doing enough and the carbon taxes should be more than they were.

I welcome today's announcement because it is an acknowledgment of the crisis. We know exactly what a pig is making today. Farmers are losing €35 per pig. The Minister announced funding of €7 million. I am glad about that. I was the first person to look for it when most Government Members were asleep as to what was happening in the pig sector. The Minister knows it will not be anywhere near enough, though. He knows that there are pig farms to which it will mean nothing. The move could have been based on what happened in France. My colleagues and I wanted a package worth €30 million, but farmers got €7 million. It will be a drop in the ocean and will not save many pig farms.

The Government has failed to make additional supports available to our other farmers despite the tremendous financial pressures they are facing. The soaring cost of food, heating, fuel and housing is causing social inequality and significant hardship and is pushing even more people into poverty. Fianna Fáil and the other parties with it seem to be oblivious to this. The Minister knows I am not being personal about this. As I have said in the Chamber previously, he is a good man and a good politician, but he is here defending the indefensible. He should be putting his hands up and saying that he knows the Government got this wrong, because it has. The other Deputies who voted for carbon taxes need to realise that they were wrong.

People will not be able to sustain this. We are not far away from the day when we are driving along the road only to look up at a pole and see that a litre of fuel, be it diesel or petrol, costs more than €2. How are people supposed to manage then? How are they supposed to fill their oil tanks? The answer from the Green Party and Fianna Fáil is that people should not fill their oil tanks and should instead go into their houses, dig up their floors, install underfloor heating and pay enormous costs for electricity even though the Government cannot ensure the supply of electricity because it has stopped people from burning turf. In other words, the Government parties have sold their souls for an agenda that does not make sense.

My good God, but there were great people in Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Labour Party long ago. They had common sense. The new crowd are running away with the fairies, though. They have completely lost their grounding. They have lost the idea that they must go to a door, knock on it and ask the person who comes out to vote for them because they will represent him or her. What have those parties done since coming up here? They have abandoned the people. People are really hurting and are finding it extremely difficult to live. Working people are even finding it too expensive to go to work because of the cost of fuel and everything else. People cannot run their homes, but the Government's only answer is that it is worried and that it will have to place burden after burden on them until 2030 because it wants Ireland to be the goody goody boys of the world and to be the fastest reducers of carbon emissions by squeezing the life out of people through taxes. The Government tells people that it is very good, though, because it will give them back some of those taxes to insulate their homes and that, if people have €65,000 to spare under the bed, it will give them €25,000. The Government is telling people that it is taking taxes from them because it is going to give those taxes back to them. It has lost all common sense. Its parties might think that they can knock on doors and people will come out and say that they will back them again because Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael or the Green Party were great for them, but the parties will be abandoned and thrown to one side. They are doing it to themselves. They have not just shot themselves in the foot – they have shot the bloody legs out from under themselves with the height of their stupidity. It does not make sense.

What does the Minister believe farmers are thinking today? If a robber had a choice between robbing a ball of money from a bank or robbing a pallet of fertiliser, the robber would be better off robbing the pallet of fertiliser because it is worth more.

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