I am the Chairperson of the budgetary oversight committee. We have had many witnesses in over the past number of months. Yesterday, we had witnesses in who agreed with exactly what I and Independent Ireland have been saying. The Department of Finance does not talk to the Department of enterprise. The Department of Finance is responsible for divvying out the moneys but they all work separately. When it hands out bits and pieces, which it says is targeted, it does not cover everyone. The conclusion in our meeting yesterday, which was very good and informative, was if you keep doing the same thing over and over and there is no change, it is a sign of madness. The Government has got to learn from the sign of madness. It is doing the same thing over and over and getting the same result - vulnerable people suffer and the Government does not make change. We have been talking about the carbon tax and protests. Five years ago in November 2021, I brought a truck up here when truckers were protesting about fuel costs. That was five years ago yet a few months ago not only truckers but farmers, businesses and homeowners all protested and the Government still has not listened. That is after five years. The Government has got it wrong. What does it pay its Departments for, if they do not know how to react to problems? The Government is reactive, not proactive. That is its biggest problem. I have stood at Limerick Junction and at the Tipperary and Charleville shows - I stand at shows every year meeting people. Of all the shows I have gone to, I have never seen as many people coming to me with their concerns. They were all Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael all their lives. It is not only young people coming to me but it is all age groups, even people who have retired. I was at a mass at the graves of deceased family members. The last man who came up to me as I was leaving was in his eighties. He said, "Richard, what are they doing up there?" If the Government has lost all those people who stood beside it all the years and they can see the Government is getting it wrong, why can it not? They see their children and grandchildren suffering because of the people they put in here and now they are embarrassed because the Government is not learning. Why is it not learning? Why is it targeting the most vulnerable people in this country? The Government made €1.7 billion extra this year in fossil fuel taxes. The vehicles in this country are mostly from between 2010 and 2018. People are lucky to keep the vehicles they have on the road but the Government has no problem bringing in inferior food from other countries and wants the quality to stay the same here. This is what the Government has done in this country - it has forgotten the very people who put them here and put their trust in them and it is taxing them out of existence. The most badly off people are the squeezed middle, the working people, people who get up every morning and go to bed late at night. The Government does not look after them. It penalises them for working rather than giving them some bit of a reward. The harder they work, the more they are penalised by the Government. If two people in a household work, they are penalised twice as much as are their children. That is what this Government has stood for. The people are changing in Ireland and it is now showing on the ground. I thank them for that.

Sentiment score: -0.12