An tOrd Gnó - Order of Business
Seanad Éireann — 2026-04-14
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Cathal Byrne (FG), Cultural and Educational Panel

Yesterday and over the past number of days, I met with many of the people who were protesting across County Wexford. They are not the same people who are being portrayed in the media. These are ordinary working people who get up early in the morning in the dark and work through the day until dark. They are people who drive machinery and tractors. They are truck, lorry and bus drivers. They are the people who bring food across the country and take it out of fields. They are the people who bring children to school in the morning. Yes, they have incredible frustration with Government policy around fuel, but many said to me that their main frustration is the amount of taxation the Government is taking from hard-working people. They feel penalised by income tax levels, USC, PRSI and the low rate at which the top rate of tax kicks in.
They feel that they cannot work overtime and feel incredibly frustrated at how much they are paying into a pot from which they get little. They are the essence of the squeezed middle: people who are working hard, trying to get ahead but find it difficult to make ends meet. This Government has to hear clearly what they have said. It has to reflect deeply on what they have said and it has to get the message that hard-working people need lower rates of taxation to get ahead in this country. I am going to speak again on this later. I will certainly do what I can within the Fine Gael parliamentary party to be a voice for these people. The people I met are ordinary decent people and I will certainly do everything I can to take that message back to the Government.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-04-14/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:48+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-04-14