An tOrd Gnó - Order of Business
Seanad Éireann — 2026-04-14
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Sharon Keogan (IND), Industrial and Commercial Panel

I am aware there is a motion before the Dáil as we speak, so I will be very careful in what I say in order to respect our Standing Orders. However, I have to say that today's motion is an embodiment of the extreme situation our nation has come to. It is this extreme situation that I wish to speak about.
A number of political commentators have said the protests were somehow unexpected and came out of nowhere, but this is totally incorrect. I have mentioned twice in recent months the threat of the collapse of the haulage and other industries posed by the Government’s energy policy.
I have spoken repeatedly about the Government's policy on energy that does not exploit or explore our own gas fields, shuts down our peat harvesting plants and then increases tax on increasingly expensive fuel. People need to work. These are taxes which Labour and Sinn Féin supported. This insane directionless policy has been sleepwalking us into fatal vulnerability. Now, here we are. A global energy shock happened and life has been made simply impossible in this country. People cannot afford to move out and if they get a job, they cannot afford to drive to it. With the continuing cap on Dublin Airport added to the global energy crisis, soon enough we will not be able to afford to leave the country. Yet, we run a budget surplus and we are supposedly one of the richest countries in the world. God knows, I hear constituents speak of how hard the tax bill hurts them, so where does this money go? The €300,000 bike shed, the €56 million bailout to RTÉ and the €6 billion to IPA accommodation. It goes straight into the pockets of already rich landlords and then how many millions of euro go to the NGOs and the quangos with no accountability? These protests were not predictable. They were inevitable and until we see a serious reversal of course and a serious new vision for this nation, this crisis will remain inevitable.

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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