Mattie McGrath (Tipperary, Independent) | Oireachtas source

The Acting Chairman told me earlier that it was his first time in the Chair and I wish him well, but we will not take any such clandestine lectures before we start our contributions. He will need a lesson in chairing if he wants to take up the role again.

We are opposed to the proposal. We are ten Deputies, as Deputy Verona Murphy said earlier, and we are regarded as laggards, blackguards, backward, gombeen men and whatever else. What have we seen since the Government came into power? It can blame the Ukraine war or whatever it likes, but this was always coming. Last October, we sought a debate on these issues, as did anyone who is in business or who knows anything about business. Ordinary people cannot heat their homes or turn on their electric blanket, if they can afford one. The Government is making the people perish and it is punishing people on lower incomes and those who are less well off.

Meanwhile, the blackguarding goes on. People who have installed solar panels cannot get onto the grid, and nor can people who have installed a miniature wind turbine near their house. People have made all kinds of efforts to install various kinds of heating systems and want to make an effort, but they cannot. The laggards and the blackguards are the Minister's Government and successive Administrations, which have blackguarded the people. The Government thinks that now, it can frighten them into accepting anything. That is not going to happen. Just because it frightened the life out of people with Covid, it thinks it can frighten them now with the latest green policies. It has a rude awakening coming. We are not climate change deniers but we know that people need to live as well as everything else. Why is the Government not hitting data centres or big business? The Government and the Minister – I am shocked – have become servants of the global masters instead of the people. The ESB is making ridiculous profits, as are Bord Gáis and the whole lot of them. They are piling increases onto the people.

I will conclude with the permission of the Acting Chairman, in case he lectures me again. To think the Government might come back here after a two-week break and introduce another carbon tax increase is utter folly, and I do not mind saying it here tonight. It can keep on with its folly and we know where it will get its Deputies. I will not mention "airy-fairy" or anything like that in case people get insulted, but folly-folly and dolly mixtures are what the Government is now.

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