Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael)

That is just not true. I just told the Deputy what we are doing. She asked a very important question on a very important issue. The whole assertion of her question and the premise behind it was that we did nothing on energy. She stood up, and the record of the Dáil will show it, and said we did not reduce tax. I am telling her that we reduced value added tax on energy bills for the next five years in the budget. That is an error – one cannot use the L word in here, but it was the first mistruth the Deputy told.

Second, the Deputy said we did not help working families. We extended the fuel allowance to people who get a working family payment. That is a second mistruth the Deputy told.

The third thing she said is that the Taoiseach and I had not said what we will do in relation to energy companies. I told her we brought in a tax on their profits that has yielded €271 million over the past two years. The Sinn Féin plan was to hand over taxpayers' money to the energy companies. There was a clear choice in the last election. The people gave their verdict and they voted for centrist politics instead of Sinn Féin policies that would have bankrupted the nation and spent €4 billion more in the budget.

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