Michael Collins (Cork South West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I cannot understand why the Government is giving electricity benefits at all. It is robbing the people with one hand and giving them little tokens with the other. The bottom line here is that people are paying through the neck at the filling stations because the Government continues to increase the price of fuel, the price of a bag of coal for a person trying to light a fire and the price of home heating oil for the ordinary person. It taxes the people on their electricity bills, car fuel and home heating oil and taxes them through the hospitality sector, with the VAT rate increasing from 9% to 13.5%. What is wrong with the Government? Does it think the Irish people do not know what it is doing to them? People are at the end of their tether. They tell me all over my constituency. They are terrified of the next electricity bill. We were told the smart meter would be the revolution of Ireland. I do not know. Maybe I am wrong somewhere, but there is something furiously wrong because for most people I know who have put in a smart meter, their electricity bills have quadrupled.

The Minister, Deputy Eamon Ryan, has kicked Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael into a corner and whacked them into a false sense of security. Look what the Government did with the Barryroe opportunity, which would have made Ireland energy-independent. What are we doing instead? We are depending on the world to fuel our country and to put the lights on. What if the world decides it has a different agenda? The Government has backed the green agenda, which is a shocking and horrible agenda against the ordinary, hard-working rural Irish people, who will never forget the Government for what it has done. They are not forgetting the Government anyway because they tell me they are waiting for members of Government parties to come to their doors. They will talk to them if they will be left there long enough to hear what they have to say. It is shocking to listen to families not able to afford to buy food at the end of the week because the electricity bill has to be paid and, if it is not, the electricity might get cut off. That is a terrifying experience for anybody. People are sick to death of paying high rates of tax.

The Minister, Deputy Eamon Ryan, is back in the Chamber. The rural Independents have finished talking and he is coming back in now, of course. This is no time to come back, Minister. The crisis is here today. Stand before us and listen to what our people are telling us and do not be going away when we are talking and coming back when we are finished because we are talking on behalf of the people of this country, whom you crucify.

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