Richard O'Donoghue (Limerick County, Independent) | Oireachtas source

The cracks are showing, are they not? I see the Minister's party colleagues are on radio saying that they believe the peat plants should be opened up again to provide power for the people who put them here to protect them. We all want to protect the environment and the universe but we put our people first and we work for the future. What the Minister has done to the people of Ireland is nothing but criminal. What his party has done to people of Ireland and the hardship it will put them through is nothing but criminal. Who pays the most? It is the people without infrastructure.

The reason the Minister cannot understand this is that he is coming from the place he lives that has infrastructure. Now people in the outer parts of Dublin are saying that they do not have the infrastructure either. He has caused inflation by all the different things he has done such as the insulation grants which are based on fossil fuels. He brought out a grant and it was eaten up by rising costs at a time when we needed to make sure that people were looked after.

The Government closed down Bord na Móna and peat. What has it done now? It is burning coal to keep the lights on. That is the reality because there is no infrastructure here. What it has been telling the people is that it will help them, it will reduce the VAT here and it will give them reductions. I have bills here going back to 2020. The unit costs and standard charges have gone up. What the Government forgot to mention to the people when it said it was giving money off and would help them was that as standard charges and PSO levies went up, it would charge the VAT on top of that. The Government's reduction is on the increase. It has actually given no reduction. The standard charges have gone up. Its VAT intake is still higher with what it is giving back from 2020 to 2021 to 2021. I have it all here. The Government has actually given nothing back. Its intake is the same.

I brought up Fossett's Circus previously and I must compliment it. Due to the publicity it got from that, it contacted me during the week. Would the Minister believe that it has given a couple of hundred tickets for a charity night in Limerick because of its name being put out there? The one thing people said to me was that the Minister was not fit to be in that circus and he was not fit to be here.

See this speech in context