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

We have been asking for some real meaningful reduction for motorists, the haulage industry and people who use fuel to heat their homes. We have asked for it day after day here. What the Government is offering this evening is very minimal. The Government is saying that this is what is being provided and that it had to get permission from Europe to be allowed to reduce the VAT rate. In all my time, I never heard that we had to ask Europe to increase it in the first place. That is a fact. I know I am right. I never heard that the Government had to get permission to increase it in the first place. Reducing VAT on gas and electricity to 13.5% and 9% only is of no use to the people who are on the road with four wheels under them, whatever type of vehicle it is. That is not enough. These people are hard-pressed and their backs are to the wall. What is being offered is very minimal and it is not enough. The carbon tax on a 900 litre fill of home heating oil is €106.07. That is massive. As I said earlier today, people are under savage pressure, especially those who are working and who on their own. Farmers are hard-pressed with the savage cost of fuel. The Government is hurting people very badly. People in Kerry, the county that I am proud to represent, are being hit by the suggestion that they cannot buy turf. Is it because there is no VAT in turf? What set did the Government against turf all of a sudden? There is so much else to be sorted out in the world. We see what is happening in other countries. We are all under the one sky. Look at what they are doing in America. Look at the size of the vehicles that they are driving. Russia and China are using coal-burning power stations to generate electricity. The Government trying to stop poor people who have traditionally cut and sold turf to their neighbours. The Minister for the Environment, Climate and Communications said that grannies would not be criminalised. God almighty, these people are the people who brought our country to where it is today. They worked flat on their backs when there was nothing at all in this country. They cut the turf and kept themselves warm. It is absolutely ridiculous to think that at the end of their days, some Minister in power would try to stop them from buying a few bags of turf, a rail of turf or a butt of turf, as it was known. It is absolutely ridiculous. Our family unit would have disintegrated back in the early 1930s and 1940s if it was not for turf. All my grandmother, grandfather and father had was four cows. They sold a few rails of turf and a bank of turf. The purchaser cut it and saved it themselves. That is how they, and many people like them, survived. The Government has crossed the line with the measure and has hurt many people in rural Ireland. It was the Minister for the Environment, Climate and Communications who suggested it. He is part of the Government and he has to be controlled. The Government has lost a lot of ground with what he has said and done in the past few weeks. I am sorry that the people of rural Kerry have been hurt. They are angered, mad, sad and sore at what has gone on in the past number of weeks. The Minister had free rein out in the open when he was on holiday. He is nearly more dangerous when is on holiday than when he is here, because we can curtail him some bit. The Government crossed the line in allowing the Minister to do what he did and say what he said.

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