Thomas Byrne (Meath East, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Regarding the conference, the Commission and the Council have published a list of conclusions and how they can be implemented. I assume that their documents are publicly available. They go issue by issue and set out how the recommendations can be implemented.

For some people, it is always someone else's responsibility, but it is all of our responsibility to highlight the good things that the EU does. There are certain things that can immediately be attached to the EU, for example, vaccines. We need to do more of that with climate change. I know some young people who have the Interrail card. Aside from everything else that the EU does, that card is good and tangible. If we do not speak about democracy and the benefits of that democracy, including the democracy that is the EU, then we will allow other people to say otherwise.

The Commission is examining this matter. It had been handling some of the issues that were raised, so it was astonished that people did not know that. That has been a major lesson for the Commission. It will have to get better at communicating some of what it is doing. That requires an educated citizenry. Thank God, we have that here in Ireland. More and more kids are learning about European issues in school.

We have our Blue Star programme in schools. We also have civic, social and political education, CSPE, as part of the general curriculum for children. That is also important and we all have a responsibility in this area.

On qualified majority voting, it is hard to tell people what the real difference would be in their lives if this were to come about. We spent a lot of time dealing with this and my impression is that most countries do not wish to spend a lot of time dealing with it and navel-gazing. As I said, we have achieved many practical outcomes through consensus in recent years. Where concerns have been expressed to me, they have been in the context of enlargement. We are keen on enlargement. Other countries have expressed a concern that perhaps decision-making could become unwieldy. Again, we have a great deal of work to do on enlargement and our objective as a Government is to get these countries into the Union when they are ready and to help them to get ready to do so. We can consider having an institutional debate during that process, but that is not our number one priority.

There is a lot going on in energy. It is important to remember what has happened already. With all these rows, such as why we are not bringing in a windfall tax, etc., which was going on for weeks, we brought in that windfall tax last Friday and hardly a word was said about it. It is worth recalling what the Government did at EU level in conjunction with other European governments last Friday. Where large financial gains have been made by energy companies on what are called inframarginal rents, which are, essentially, non-gas electricity supplies, there will be a solidarity contribution on those profits. A solidarity levy will be placed on the fossil fuel sector as well. Work will also be done in the area of electricity demand reduction. People laugh when it is said that we need to reduce demand, but this is just a fact. We need to do this and there are ways of doing it, especially at peak times. The Commission for Regulation of Utilities will be working on this also to help us get through this winter. We achieved a significant amount last Friday in introducing a windfall tax. Shell has now asked the British Government to do something similar. The European Union has done this and we have done it together.

It is worth recalling when we have done these very positive things as governments working together. In this case, it just involved the governments working together under this particular provision of the treaty and not the European Parliament, but generally the Parliament would also be involved. This is a good development. It is like everything else in that when there is a problem, we never hear the end of it, and then little is said when there is a solution. Perhaps it is only us who do not talk enough about these kinds of developments. This is not the entire solution but it is certainly a large part of it.

The Minister, Deputy Eamon Ryan, has estimated that between €1 billion and €2 billion will accrue to the Government. This will be redirected into ensuring that we are energy secure and that energy is affordable in the coming months. A great deal of other work is also ongoing. I can talk about that as well if the committee wishes.