Mattie McGrath (Tipperary, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am glad the Minister is here because I have some questions. I was in the Chair earlier and listened attentively to his opening speech. What is happening is unbelievable and bizarre. It is grotesque, unprecedented, bizarre and unbelievable, GUBU. We are back in the days of the 1980s. The people cannot survive. I cannot understand the disconnect and why Government backbenchers are not telling the Government that. Are they in hiding?

The people are infuriated with the cost of living. The war is horrific and what is happening is outrageous, but this crisis was heading towards us in a gale force 9 storm before there was ever a shot fired or troop landed by Russia anywhere near Ukraine. A perfect storm was coming and the Government insisted on introducing a carbon tax. Why did the Government lock us out of voting on it again between 2020 and 2030? Carbon tax can be increased in every budget without any recourse to the House, or any discussion, debate or vote.

A businessman in my constituency, Willie O'Halloran, called me yesterday. When diesel was €1.60 the tax collected was 60 cent. If diesel is €2.60 the tax is €1.20 and if diesel goes to €3.60, which it could, the tax will be €1.80. The more prices go up, the more the Government is takes in. I want the Minister to address that honestly and tell me I am wrong. I asked the Minister of State about this, who acknowledged my point. This is daylight robbery. The Government is rubbing its hands like a fat pig going to market or a man in a fair rubbing his hands and making money out of people's misery. I cannot believe it. The Government is happy for prices to go up.

I voted against the carbon tax. Another increase will be put through in April. Will the Government change its mind on that? We have to completely change direction. We are in unprecedented times – that is one of the words in GUBU. It is a war situation. I do not remember the last war, but people told me about compulsory tillage and everything else. The Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine, Deputy Charlie McConalogue, said there is a plan. Farming organisations met him yesterday and had damning criticism of him and his officials. There was no plan and nothing was discussed. What did the Minister do? He did something that the Taoiseach, Deputy Micheál Martin, will go down in history for doing, namely, setting up a committee. A committee, commission or board of inquiry was what he set up as Minister for Health back in the 1980s, and he is continuing with that. There will be more papers, boards and board members being paid and nothing will be done.

I welcome the €1,000 payment, but I am disgusted and despise the way it was leaked from Cabinet. There was discussion about which people would or would not get the payment. The Government is dividing and conquering the people. There has been a lot of praise around Covid and a lot of things happened. I want to support everyone and sympathise with anyone who lost their life, but we are throwing around money like confetti at a wake. I remember the night the PUP was introduced. I fought with the Minister and begged him to base it on PRSI and what people were earning. Students who were earning €80 at the weekend got the full Covid payment. As an employer, I know that PRSI records are at my fingertips and it is paid weekly now, unlike five or six years ago.

Payback time is coming with a double whammy of the oil crisis and war. The people will be crucified. It is Lent, and Holy Week and Good Friday are coming, but the Government should not crucify all of the people. We crucified Our Lord once and that was enough. It was a horrific thing to do. I ask the Government not to crucify all of the people. Where is the compassion, moral compass and respect for the electorate? There are now so many bosses in government that it is like The Three Stooges. There is one today and there will be another one tomorrow, such as the Minister, Deputy Ryan.

I told the Taoiseach today that he is respecting, honouring and bowing down to the globalists and elite in Europe and is not serving the people. We as Teachtaí Dála are servants of the people. We are messengers of the people and must do good for the people. If we cannot do good, we should not do bad. The Government said "How high?" to Europe. How come Sweden, Denmark and Poland were able to reduce oil prices to 2018 levels? The Government has told us it will not go near VAT.

The paltry measure the Government came up with yesterday was a 20 cent cut in road diesel. Some businesses increased prices by 20 cent, and I condemn that fundamentally. It is a horrible thing to do. It is price gouging. The Government leaked the measure. Why did it not make a decision and announce it straight away so that companies could not increase prices? Some places increased prices by more than 20 cent last night. Prices went up three times today in one filling station I know.

The Government is reducing tax on road diesel by 15 cent. I said earlier to the Taoiseach that lorries will be abandoned in yards because they require AdBlue. If that is not used, vehicles will stop and be left on our roads. The Taoiseach did not answer my question. He said the hauliers are great and export all of our stuff that Europe buys from us. We pay a high price for support from Europe. It is not very supportive of us. It did not support of us during Brexit and in many other areas.

We have sold our sovereignty. I do not know what is left. Everything in this country has been sold bar the kitchen sink. What we have not sold, the Government will have sold before it is run out of government. It will be a long time before these parties are back in government again. This is nothing personal towards the Minister.

The farmers of Ireland are being asked to plough more. It now costs €300 to fill an average tractor, and that fuel would not last a day. AdBlue is required for modern tractors. I have an email in which the Green Party suggested an EU directive suggested that farmers could not plough up but only down a hill. People come up with that kind of bunkum. I know of high, dangerous land where people cannot plough up hills. People will be stopped from ploughing up hills. The Government stopped people ploughing and setting corn. The Minister was not involved in the set-aside policy, but his party was. It was an attack on nature. Spraying meant that birds, bees and other insects could not live on land.

Fianna Fáil closed the sugar factory, which was the biggest mistake that was ever made. We are now dismantling the fishing industry and giving it compensation, a horrible dirty word, to scrap vehicles. Who will feed the people with fish, a natural resource so much of which we have sold off? Who will be able to plough, sow, spray, mind, reap and harvest tillage crops if they do not have the fuel to do so?

I cannot believe the Government did not do anything about home heating oil.

The folly of the Minister, Deputy Eamon Ryan, and the directives from his Department is that one cannot build a house with a chimney now. People are going to freeze in their houses, and they cannot boil a kettle if they are depending on the ESB. If we get temperatures of -10°C or -12°C, the heat pumps to heat the air will stop. We know that from the last big freeze we had in 2010. Cad a dhéanfaimid feasta gan Rialtas? The Government is absent and is missing in action. It is persecuting the people. I do not know what kind of a death wish it has against the people. Cromwell was not as bad. We resisted him out in Cluain Meala, but he told people to head off to Connacht. The Government is giving people no place to go.

There is land in Kerry, Donegal and many other counties that is not arable. It cannot be ploughed. There is land in the valley of the Suir and the owner, Michael Morrissey, was always boasting that in 1947, when there was compulsory ploughing, he had 330 Irish acres of land - tá sé imithe anois; fuair sé bás - and there were three fields he did not have to plough because it was wetland that flooded. The Government is not taking that into account at all. The Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine, Deputy McConalogue, is in dreamland. He came up with a dream. The farm organisations, including Macra na Feirme, condemned what happened. They went in expecting action, but there was an empty room, empty heads and no ideas. There was no vision and no passion. It was decided to set up a committee that will meet on Friday. Imagine that, in the middle of a crisis that was here long before a bullet was ever fired in Ukraine or a soldier moved next or near it, but the Government will blame that. It has been blaming Covid for everything for the last two years. As far as I am concerned, it was total overkill. The narrative was driven by the media. Are we going to allow the narrative in this war to be driven by the media again? We are.

The Government is supposed to govern. The Taoiseach, Deputy Micheál Martin, is talking about setting up another citizens' assembly. This is a citizens' assembly anseo. I have the privilege of being elected here for the time being and so has the Minister. This is a citizens' assembly. There is no talk about the cost of the citizens' assemblies. The waste of money is just phenomenal.

The Government closed down all the peat plants and the coal burning stations. Deputy Danny Healy-Rae and I asked the Taoiseach if he would re-examine the LNG plant - the answer was "No" - and if he will try to do some harvesting at sea - the answer was "No". We are ten years away from any real solar energy and wave energy. We are going to be perished with the cold. We will have three coats on us. I was in the Chair here this afternoon and everything went off aside from the lights. It was a technical glitch. We are all going technical now, with switches for this and switches for that, but we cannot light a fire. Cad a dhéanfaimid feasta because we cannot get the kippens that I remember an old lady in Newcastle, Josie O'Connor, gathering and keeping the fire warm. There is plenty of timber, but the Minister, Deputy Eamon Ryan, does not want to cut it. He wants to make window boxes out of it, south-facing ones, and put carrot seeds and whatever else in them. That is his view, and we all know what he thinks about people. However, why is the Government allowing itself to be led along by the nose by the Green Party? I am not a climate change denier, but it is big hoax to punish the people. Carbon tax is a punitive tax and affects people in fuel poverty more than anything else.

It is one fiasco after another. The Minister for Finance was here last week and he insulted us, saying we did not cost anything. I asked the Minister about the children's hospital, that daft black hole that was built in the wrong place. It was a political decision by the Minister's leader and others to build it there. It is still not out of the hole, and it is going to cost billions. The national broadband plan costs billions. The Government is going to bring water from the Shannon to Dublin, through the best of the land that we are going to plough and till and grow grass on, to put it into a pipe system that leaks 48% of the water, as independent studies have shown. Kindergarten children would not behave like this, but the Government is behaving like this in the national Parliament. The Taoiseach is gone off somewhere - I do not know where he said the summit is. It is not a summit at all, but a gathering. We are welded to the globalists and the EU masters. When they say, "Jump", the Taoiseach asks how high. The Minister for Finance is the same. The Minister for Foreign Affairs, Deputy Coveney, is going to the Bilderberg conferences and God knows where else. World order is the next thing, when we will not have enough to eat.

In the middle of it all, I understand the Cabinet was informed yesterday that the ESB made a profit of €620 million last year. It is fleecing people with charges. The public service obligation, PSO, levy is fleeced from customers to pay for wind turbines. When the wind is not blowing when it is sunny, they are stopped and when the wind is blowing too strong, they are turned off. That is plunder of the people. The ESB should be held to account. It is a semi-State body. The Minister should call it in and tell it that it can make a profit of perhaps €10 million or so, but €620 million is more than €2 million a day. People cannot pay the bills. The bills in restaurants, pubs or any catering industry have gone up, not to mention those of the homes, the schools and voluntary boards of management trying to collect it. The Government has lost all sense of perspective and of reality. The more it puts on in taxes and the higher the price of fuel goes, the better it likes it. The Government tells us about the GDP rate and so forth. That is on the back of the blood and sweat of the people. People have to travel to work, but they will not be able to go to work. Building and construction sites will be stopped. Machines will be parked because people cannot afford to use them. They have tenders and contracts for jobs at fixed prices. They are in a perilous situation and all the Government does is go off to whatever city is picked - it might be Venice or the like - to have an informal, not formal, meeting.

I would love to know what is going on behind those closed doors. What is going on at Bilderberg? What is going on at other global meetings to which the globalist Fine Gael is connected to? Now, the Taoiseach, Deputy Micheál Martin, is running after it, trying to be as good as it. It is so he will get a fat job in Europe when he is run out of this Government and out of this Parliament by the people. No doubt, he will be appointed to Europe, like many others who were here. I could name some of them, but I will not. Shame on the Government to do this. We are voting against this. I did not even talk about the measure the Minister is introducing tonight regarding the excise duty. We submitted an amendment, but we have not had sight of the amendments yet, not even at this time of night and when we are due to debate it in 20 minutes.

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