I appreciate Minister of State is here but I thought the Minister for energy would be before us today because the Minister of State, Deputy Dooley, is before us every day of the week on every issue. He will soon become Taoiseach of the country. He had a great go at us on RTÉ yesterday. That is part of the game. This is a very serious issue. I am very critical of the Green Party because it spent four or five years in government and did not move us properly towards renewables and we are now left in a crisis situation. People are in a desperate situation. I received a message last night from a fisherman who told me he was out at sea for 14 days, which cost him €31,000 in fuel. The Minister knows the crisis situation with regard to fisheries. The few days fishermen can go out costs them more. The same person to whom I referred employs 33 people and is worried about how they will pay their workers never mind pay for fuel. Fuel protests over the past few weeks should tell us that people all over the country are hurting. People cannot afford the never-ending taxing of everything. We need to do something about the cost of heating. There needs to be some type of package for the regular householder, the middle man and woman who cannot fill their oil tanks. People who used to get a fill or half a fill are now buying five gallon drums of heating oil. I ask the Government to seriously consider something for these people. The Government has spent years piling tax on to diesel, and telling us we have to meet our climate targets and that is climate action while doing very little to reduce harmful emissions. People who depend on diesel have to earn a living. It is about survival. Farmers, hauliers, fisherman and contractors are being punished for using the only fuel that will do the job while practical solutions are ignored or quietly parked. Hydrotreated vegetable oil, HVO, is a renewable diesel made from waste oil. It works in existing engines. It cuts emissions immediately and does not require people to scrap vehicles or machinery that have years of life left in them. That is common sense climate action but good luck trying to get HVO in Ireland. There is no domestic production, almost no availability and no urgency from the Government to make it accessible to the sectors that need it most. Separately, there are engine based technologies like hydrogen on demand systems. These are not fuels and do not replace diesel. Rather, they are devices designed to make engines burn cleaner and more efficiently. Whether they succeed or fail should be decided by a proper independent assessment, not by indifference or refusal to engage. People are sick of new ideas being waved away while carbon tax goes up without hesitation. If this is really about emissions, the focus should be on enabling cleaner fuels like HVO and seriously evaluating technologies that could reduce pollution. This morning, I read that the Chinese are making a plane that can be flown with water instead of fossil fuel. That tells us the world is moving on but Ireland is a laggard in terms of movement on renewables. Technologies could reduce pollution and stop the habit of using taxation as a substitute for solutions. Right now people see more tax, more lectures and very little practical help. I spoke to the Taoiseach about the Barryroe oil field on Leaders' Questions in 2022 when Eamon Ryan was wagging the tail. In 2026 he says Ursula von der Leyen is wagging the tail and he cannot reopen it. Parties in here say that we cannot have fossil fuels. They are all living in a different space age than I am. The fact is that, as we have seen in the last few weeks, if anything happens to the link from Moffat in Scotland, we would cease to operate in about a week without fuel. That is the bottom line. What I have always suggested is that we drill off Barryroe and any oil that we get from there would pay for renewables in this country. We could tax them to the hilt to pay for it - not the people but those who are drilling out there - and then put in our renewables. Where are our wind energy and solar panels? If it costs €20,000, you get €1,800 back in a grant. We are not on the real planet here. We are out of touch completely when it comes to solar, retrofitting, HVO, and hydrogen on-demand systems. The price of electric cars is astronomical. Manufacturers promise that cars will do 450 km but when you speak to the service mechanics, they tell us that you would be lucky to get 350 km. We also need to look at battery trucks. The problem is that we are laggards. Countries like China and New Zealand have lorries that run on batteries. They have battery chargers that take ten minutes. I know a gentleman in my area in Schull who has experienced that and worked with it. He keeps asking why we have to wait for the rest of Europe to do it before we might consider it in 15 or 20 years’ time. Where was the vision when the Green Party was in government? It did not deliver for renewables as it was supposed to do.

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