I was in Newcastle West last week at the agricultural show, the Newcastle West Show. One thing resonated with me at the show. A young girl of nine years of age from County Kerry came up to me. She was standing in front of me, her mother was behind her and I think her aunt was with her as well. She turned around to her mother and her mother said, "Ask him yourself". She asked if she could have a picture with me. I was intrigued as to why she wanted the picture. I was intrigued to know why a nine-year-old girl from Kerry recognised me and wanted a picture. I asked her, "Why do you want the picture with me?" Do you know what she said to me at nine years of age? She said: "My mammy takes me to training. My mammy takes me to my matches. My mammy could not take me to two matches because of fuel." She said I stood with them during the fuel crisis. That is what a nine-year-old from Kerry was saying. Can the Minister of State imagine that? It is not a laughing matter when a nine-year-old is saying it. Independent Ireland had our stall at the show in Newcastle West, and I did not get a minute to myself with people coming up to me thanking me for standing with them, for holding a peaceful process and for understanding where they were. I have said on more than one occasion that the people who were at the protests, who I stood with in Foynes, County Limerick, were people who had never protested before. They were all members of the Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael parties, but they said, "Never again," because they believe they have become city-based parties, they have forgotten their roots and the Cabinet no longer reflects the whole country. These cities or large towns were built by people who came from the county. They built the likes of Dublin. They moved here and integrated. Believe it or not, Dublin, Cork, Limerick and Galway everywhere all originated from people in the county, coming to build big cities. That is where they came from. Their ancestors are here but when it comes to the next election, they will remember what the Government has done to everyone in this country who could not afford to buy an electric car. People are building new homes and have A-rated houses with heat pumps and solar panels. I commend it, but when the snow hit and they went three weeks without power, they all bought diesel generators because when the infrastructure was down, they had no other way to heat their houses. The problem with heat pumps is a 20 kW generator is needed to run them so all they will do with their generators is run an electric heater and run the power in their houses. In one sense, having an A-rated house is brilliant, but we are an island. Does the Government not understand it? Things go wrong and power goes out because of a lack of infrastructure. The Government should have allowed at least one fireplace in a house so people could heat themselves if the power goes out. What happened? They all went back to the houses of their parents, uncles, aunts, brothers and sisters that had heat because they could not sustain it in their own household. We talk to young people with young children who could not live in their own modern houses because of power outages. We are talking about how we want people using electric vehicles to protect the environment. It is great if people can afford it, but the average vehicle on the road at the moment is from between 2010 and 2018. That is what people can afford, but what does this Government do? Since that is all they can afford, it taxes them out of existence on fuel. That is what the Government is doing. It is taxing people who cannot afford to buy something electric out of existence. How will they ever get to where the Government wants them to go to? People have infrastructure in the cities, which I welcome, but outside the cities, there is nothing because of the failure of Government, which put all its eggs in one basket, and now people in Dublin are giving out that their children cannot come home because there is no place for them to live. The Government filled all the cities, trying to make them bigger and bigger, and has forgotten about the generations that have moved out and want to come back home. If infrastructure was put in around the country, people should be able to live and work anywhere in Ireland, but all the Government does is try to cram more people into the one place where it thinks it can try to control them. If the Government thinks it can give people a giveaway budget with five or six days to go coming up to the election, they will never believe it again. Each year, the Government is dropping in the ratings and, the next time, it will be dropping an awful lot more.

Sentiment score: -0.02