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

I really believe that if you live long enough you will get to see an awful lot. I welcome the Sinn Féin Private Members' motion here tonight. At the same time, this is the same Sinn Féin voted for the climate Bill, which paved the way for carbon tax increases. This is the same Sinn Féin that then proposed a motion in the Dáil against that carbon tax. When Deputy Mattie McGrath called a vote in the Convention Centre on the Finance Bill in 2020, the only backing he got was from nine Independent Deputies. Sinn Féin voted to give away our right to debate ten years of carbon tax increases to 2030. I want everybody to hear that because it is a very important message.

I welcome Sinn Féin's conversion on the road to Damascus with this motion tonight. It is recognising that it was wrong. There was no way we should have done that and people really should have listened to Deputy Mattie McGrath in 2020. They should have voted in favour of what he proposed then. We are faced with a Government that is telling us to rely more and more on electricity, with electric cars and electric heating in homes, while at the same time we are producing less and less of it at a higher and higher cost.

This is the same Government, supported by Sinn Féin because of the way it voted on those carbon tax increases, which went against our liquified natural gas facility in the north Kerry landbank. Not only did it go against it but the Minister, Deputy Eamon Ryan, in his infinite wisdom objected to it. This is the same landbank in respect of which the Tánaiste, Deputy Martin, went around north Kerry, and I will never forget it until the day I am put into a box. He smiled and shook hands with everybody and said he would be behind the people 100% in this but, of course, that was only a couple of weeks before an election and then he forgot all about it. I would love to have more time to speak on this.

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