Aontú’s Galway West by?election candidate, Orla Nugent, welcomed the fact that Minister for Communications Patrick O’Donovan is no longer seeking a Coimisiún na Meán review of media coverage of fuel protests.
At a time when ‘families, farmers and workers were pushed to breaking point by soaring fuel costs, it is remarkable that the Minister O’Donovan’s first instinct was not to address the hardship, but to question why the media reported it.
“People did not take to the roads lightly’ she insists, but ‘because they were desperate’.
“The minister’s first response was irritation that the media dared to show the country what that desperation looks like: ‘You cannot push people to the edge and then complain that the cameras caught the fall’.
Ms Nugent stated that ‘salt-of-the-earth people’ were at Lough Atalia because they felt that they had no choice, that their businesses could not last with the crippling level of taxes.
“Moreover, farmers felt ignored over the Mercosur deal. Farmers and contractors could not understand why 65 per cent of the price of fuel was going to the government in the form of taxes during a cost-of-living crisis.‘Many people down at the docks said to me that this was the straw that broke the camel’s back.’
‘The people of Galway West and the people of Ireland deserve leadership that listens, not leadership that lectures. They deserve a government that tackles the cost?of?living crisis, not the journalists reporting on it. And they deserve a media that is even-handed and free to reflect the truth, even when that truth is uncomfortable for those in power, or even to the protestors.’
