Pearse Doherty: Govt 'sat on their hands' during energy shock

Go raibh maith agat and I would like to thank Independent Ireland for bringing forward this motion on fiscal planning framework and the motion calls for a framework that would set out an economic policy response to external shocks in terms of financial supports and taxation and there's undoubtedly a need to provide certainty, to provide confidence and to re-establish trust by clearly setting out the measures that would be considered during future crises. The energy shock that we're still living through was met with a government response that was and indeed still is completely inadequate. It exposed a deep lack of preparation and it exposed an unwillingness to act from government. We saw a dangerous inertia in the face of a crisis from Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the independents. Instead of action what they seen was that they sat on their hands while people were literally crying out for help and there was an attitude across government that it wasn't anything to do with them. They acted like responding to international prices was not a job of government. They threw up their hands and blamed the markets. The primary duty of any government is to protect its people, to protect the economy and people's livelihoods but week after week as people were crying out for help this government turned away and it went further than that. Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the independents took to an approach of talking down to people. They refused to listen to what people were telling them, what they were going through and people should never have to take to the streets to force this government to act like we saw during the fuel protests but that just doesn't happen. It takes people feeling like they have no other option and the truth is that trust has been destroyed and that is why the proposal set out in this motion should be taken seriously. Sectors like the haulage, the agricultural sector, the fishery sector, they were all treated as disposable by this government and that can never ever happen again and those sectors are still under massive pressure but it isn't solely about specific sectors as we know. Just like the protests this is about a broader issue of cost of living, a crisis that affects so many people the length and breadth of this state, a crisis that is still raging today and it wasn't just caused by Trump and Israel's reckless war in Iran, it was here before that. Obviously the most recent energy spikes was brought on by that war but that came on the back of years of relentless price increases, a crisis the government has failed to get under control and indeed a crisis that the government has added to and right now the cost of living crisis is worse than ever. Households, small businesses, many of them are on the brink and right now green diesel for example is at unsustainable high levels. Home heating oil has hit record prices and the government still refuses to cut this by for a single cent in excise. Record numbers can't pay their electricity bills, 320,000 families, one in four can't pay their gas bills and yet we have a government that plan to increase taxes on gas, on home heating oil, on coal in the autumn, just a couple of months away as people are facing into the winter. Most people, schools, organisations and businesses have been completely left down and left on their own. Every worker in this state was abandoned last year in the budget by this government when you gave a billion euro, more than a billion euro in tax cuts to those at the top and left workers worse off. When people were drowning under the cost of living crisis this government chose to not give them a helping hand and people are working harder now than ever. People are doing longer hours, they're working every hour that God sends them, just trying to keep their heads above the water. They're paying more and more and yet somehow they're falling behind and I welcome the constructive proposals in this motion but the only way to respond to the scale of the pressure is with an emergency budget and to take a fraction of the surpluses for this year and use it to take the pressure off people right now. We've had report after report, more and more evidence stacking up and all of it just telling us what people already know, that life is unaffordable, that it is a struggle and something needs to give. Workers know their paycheck doesn't stretch to the end of the week anymore. Pensioners know the massive and the pressures, the costs that they're under and the measly increase in last year's budget didn't even keep up with food inflation and you can draw a straight line from that minister to the fact that the number of older people living in poverty has doubled, has doubled under your watch. Our older people, the people who've lived their life, who've paid their taxes, have done everything right yet the number of them that are in poverty has now doubled under the government's watches. We would need an automatic, we wouldn't need an automatic framework if we had a government that was in touch with what is going on up and down this country, if we had a government that was in touch with the pressure that people are under. We need to help people in the here and now but that has to be used just to buy time to make the actual long-term reforms but this government has done none of that, has done one-off measures but it has never been combined with any meaningful change to make lasting difference to people's lives. We have remained trapped in a cost-of-living crisis because the government has ran out of ideas. It just outsources responsibility to the European Union or to the markets and that has failed and it is continuing to fail people. What needs to happen and I will continue to raise it over and over again because people really need it right here, right now. We need an emergency cost-of-living package, we need an emergency budget and it cannot be held back any longer.