Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

There is a lot to go back on there. I will begin by responding to Deputy Matthews through the Chair. When Sinn Féin members were arguing over a year ago for the restructuring of the wholesale energy market at European level, who championed the opposition to that in Europe on behalf of Ireland? It was the Green Party leader - the Minister, Deputy Eamon Ryan - who clubbed together with a number of other Ministers to reject efforts which would have been of benefit to individuals right across the State. I am glad the Deputy has taken an interest in our measures. I hope he will look at some of the measures the Government is not introducing, such as the provision of Exchequer funding to do far more in terms of energy. It needs to do more. By way of example, was it Sinn Féin that brought forward legislation regarding green hydrogen, on which the Government still does not have a strategy? It has been delayed over and over again. We need changes to the retrofit scheme so that those on middle incomes can actually benefit from it.

The Minister likes to accurate all the time but he tends to change the debate. Last night, his argument was that Sinn Féin is going to have deficits left, right and centre. Now he is saying that our policy creates a modest surplus. It cannot be both. He cannot flip-flop overnight. When he is confronted by the truth, the spin drops aside. I encourage him to not go down the route of his party leader, one of whose first actions after being elected as Taoiseach was to set up a spin unit which we were successful in having dismantled.

Let us be clear on a number of things. The Minister has acknowledged that we argued for a surplus. That was based on the summer economic statement. He knows that the Budgetary Oversight Committee asked him on a number of occasions to bring forward the white paper. We said that it was likely to contain different numbers from those in the summer economic statement and would have a larger surplus. He did not do so. He announced it on the Friday night at midnight and, therefore, the Opposition could not use those numbers. We were governed by the summer economic statement even though we knew the surplus would be far more than a modest one. We could not make that claim because we did not have the numbers which the Minister would then publish at the weekend. The point is that there was a surplus. Therefore, the accusation, the spin and the fearmongering we heard from the Minister last night is inaccurate. The previous alternative budget we brought forward last year actually had the same net expenditure as what the Government had planned. I say all of this to lay bare the lies, the spin, the accusations and the fear-mongering that his party is involved in regarding Sinn Féin. If he wants to go down that road, that is fine but it is up to him.

I want to make it clear to Deputy Mathews and the Minister that I stand 100% over the fact that we should have an energy price cap. Just last week, I raised the fact that Germany has now introduced an energy price cap. Is it not the case that Germany has introduced an energy price cap? Like many counties across Europe, Germany is bringing certainty to its citizens that energy prices will not go up over the winter period. The Minister is refusing to do that. Instead, he is trying to scaremonger and suggest that the reason his party's sister party, the Tory Party in Britain, got into so much of an economic mess was because it introduced Sinn Féin policy. I will make two things clear here. The Tory Party in Britain introduced a price cap for electricity and gas for a two-year period. Sinn Féin has argued for a price cap for five months and the Labour Party in Britain argued for a price cap for six months. We argued that the cap should only be on electricity; in Britain it was introduced on electricity and gas. As the Minister knows, the introduction of this cap was not the issue that impacted the markets because they did not announce that in the budget but announced it two weeks beforehand. If he is honest with this committee, the Minister will admit that he knows all too well what happened with the chaos in the markets in Britain. The British Government's finance spokesperson announced a budget which involved unfunded tax cuts for the rich. That was the issue. What have the Brits done now? They have abandoned those tax cuts, they have adopted the Labour Party policy of a price cap for six months, which is further than we would go, and they have introduced this for electricity and gas; which again goes further than we would. Our policy is not the Tory Party policy which got the UK into trouble. Indeed, the cause of the issues there was the proposed cuts to benefit the most wealthy. The Minister's party policies, rather than those of Sinn Féin, are probably more akin to such an approach. If he wants to be truthful and honest, the Minister will say that he knows the reaction in the markets happened as a result of the budget measures brought in by the Tories, which mainly involved tax cuts for elites. The price cap was announced two weeks previously and did not provoke the same reaction. As I have said, I would not agree with that type of price cap. I am not arguing that we should have a price cap for two years or that we should have a price cap for gas. What I am arguing for is a price cap on electricity for five months over the winter period. This is similar to what the Labour Party in Britain advocated, although it went further, and is what the Brits, in terms of the Tory Government, have now had to come back to.

Does the Minister think Germany is reckless for introducing a price cap for its citizens? What about the other European countries, representatives of which he sits around with in the Eurogroup? Will he look their finance ministers in the face and tell them they are being reckless in what they are doing? The measures we are proposing do not even go as far as Germany or many other countries throughout the European Union. I remind the Minister that he shares his time at the Eurogroup, which he chairs, with the finance ministers of those countries. The Minister can carry on with his scaremongering but he should at least try to be accurate. The point I am making is that it does not wash.

The reason I focused on and raised the issue of retrofits was to try to convey a point. One third of people across the State heat their homes with home heating oil and two thirds of them are in rural communities, such as those in the north west and along the Border. I could go on at length about this. When one examines the statistics for deprivation and disposable income, one finds that many Border communities are at the lower end of the scale. As these are poorer households, they have less energy efficiency, as shown in the statistics, in their homes. They do not have the ability to have their homes retrofitted in a timely manner. That is the point I am making. I am never going to stop pointing out to the Minister, who is a former Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform and a former Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport and has sat around the Cabinet table for the guts of a decade, that he has allowed for deep and shallow retrofitting in those homes to decline by a massive scale. He failed to plan in terms of workforce and in terms of resources to make sure those houses would be up to standard. That is his legacy in this regard. It might be uncomfortable for him to hear that as he exits the door of the Department of Finance, but I am going to lay that out for him because it is the lived experience and reality of people in my constituency. The amendment I have before this committee today seeks to do something positive for those individuals over the winter months - to reduce the price of heating their homes by bringing about a decrease of €117 in the price of a fill of home heating oil. That is what we could do here today. We cannot go back to when the Minister started in government. We cannot sort out all the inadequacies in his approach, such as his failure to plan for this, but we can do something positive today to reduce the impact on these people. That is why I will be pressing this amendment.

I want to bring matters to a conclusion shortly. I acknowledge ideology and debate are important, but not all the points being made have related to the amendments.