Michael Fitzmaurice (Roscommon-Galway, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I agree with the previous speaker that if the individual targets are not laid before the House one by one, it is totally undemocratic. If I go on a journey from my place to Dublin and check it on Google, it tells me where I will start and finish. We have not done the measurements in the line of anything in agriculture. We are at a default position. I met members of Teagasc and we looked at different figures. We do not know where we are going. We do not know what we are putting up at present so how do we know what we have to get to?

Let us be clear that nobody is against offshore but the reality is it will take until 2032. It will not be next week or next month. People are under ferocious pressure at present. I hear people from Government bodies saying that they do not agree with carbon tax, or that they will have a meeting this evening or whatever. There is one way we will show them tonight and that is to vote against this Bill. That is the way we will show them. There is no point in saying it in a half-hearted way.

On the farming community, what people do not understand is the food they eat comes from a farm and the more the price of diesel and inputs go up, the more they will pay for food. That is the reality. The Minister talked about new ideas. Anaerobic digestion is under his remit. At present, if you are in Bord Bia, you cannot use anything out of an anaerobic digester, if that digester came from where Irish Water has either sewerage or a water plant. That is not a runner and it is all blocked at the moment. People in the cities will get a fair shock very shortly when their sewage does not go anywhere.

On top of that, we have always said that the UK, the Corrib gas field and part of Norway gives us our gas. We saw this evening that the UK is cutting out everything from Russia. This is what will happen; nationalism will start to play a role. People in Germany will say they will mind themselves, the Brits will say the same and we will be like the pet lamb in a set of triplets. There will be only two teats on the ewe, we will be the third one and we will be starved. That is what will happen in the line of energy in this country.

For God's sake, at a time of war and at a time when people are paying colossal prices for stuff, we are talking about more ways of screwing them in the coming years. It is time we copped on in here. If the Government believes in what it is doing, it should put it before the people of the country in an election and they will soon tell it what they think.

See this speech in context