Seán Canney (Galway East, Independent) | Oireachtas source

How do I follow that? This is an interesting discussion. We have to take decisions on climate change and climate action. At the same time as we are doing that in this country, many people are finding it hard to actually go along with everything that is being pushed at them. I will tell a story about St. Patrick's weekend in 2017, at this time of year, when I was on a trade mission to China. I went to the Great Wall of China. I met many trucks bombing up the road with black smoke spewing out of their backs. They were lorries bringing coal to the coal power stations in China. It was an incredible sight. I still have that vivid image in my mind. We are trying to do something in this country. We are a small country, yet that is happening across the world. That is just a by the way.

Today I met a group which has a serious concern about the erection of wind turbines beside their properties. We will get green energy and so on from it but the outcry is that this money is being invested by investors in projects to raise money for themselves. They cover it in talk about community dividends and how we will have better electricity. We now have, rising up, many people who are resisting that type of development in places where houses are within 1 km or 2 km of these ginormous wind turbines. At least three are going on in my own county, Galway, at the moment, which are at different stages of planning. It is creating much division and stress among communities. It brings me back to a matter. I am going the long way around this. I am a bit like Deputy Durkan and have much to say about this.

I know people who have gone the other way and put microgeneration solar panels on their roofs. They were sold a pup when they did that because, as of now, some have still not get any kind of payback for the surplus they produce, which is going back into the grid. The energy suppliers have free rein over that. That is not the witnesses' fault but the putting in place of the legislation has been delayed. I got an email from a guy who said to me that he changed energy supplier. He has not been paid by the new guy or the old guy and it has been left in abeyance. He has paid the capital for his photovoltaic panels. Everything is fine, except if somebody comes to him and asks how that has worked out, he would tell that person not to touch it with a 40 ft. pole, because it caused grief and people do not get the payback they are entitled to. That is his take on it.

I know a man who said he was going to do his bit for the environment and bought an electric vehicle. He held onto it for about eight months then sold it again because the infrastructure was not there to support him. He travelled a lot and when he pulled up in a place with a public charger, he would find there were two or three cars in front of him and he would have to wait for two or three hours. It was not at all viable. It is a great that we have this idea that we are going to change over. We need to do it but we are not putting the necessary infrastructure in place to create the new society that we are going to have in advance of doing all of these changes.

We are charging carbon tax to fund this infrastructure that I presume we need. I presume that is what the carbon tax is for at the end of the day. We will use it for things such as providing electric vehicle chargers, or maybe not. One can look at it and ask where we are going with this. One can look at the farmers. Decisions were made which affected my constituency in Galway East and the sugar factory in Tuam. I do not know if they had computers at the time, but some guy sitting in Europe decided that we did not need any more sugar beet factories in this country. During that time, it closed the sugar beet industry in Ireland on the whim of somebody who said it was the right thing to do and we did not need this anymore. The result in my constituency and right across Galway, Mayo and Roscommon was that we got rid of the farming we had at the time, which involved rotational crops. We had the root crops, the barley, wheat and so on. All of these crops were being produced. The ground was being sown. There was probably less beef at the time and fewer cows in our area. The whole thing closed down and people are now raising either sheep or beef. They are being told that is the wrong thing to do and it sticks in their craw that they are being told by somebody else that they are doing the wrong thing.

There are many things that we can discuss about this. I will repeat a question I always ask at the end of the day. If we are going to electrify everything, considering what has happened with the increase in oil prices in the last couple of months and how people put heat pumps into new houses or retrofitted existing ones, what costs do these people face bi-monthly? I have seen bills of up to €2,300 for a two-month period. People were doing the right thing but there is no back-up for them. As we know, electricity prices went through the roof. In essence, I am saying that we are creating a bad taste with all of these policies because this is their effect.

The other question I can think of is technical. I do not know whether the witnesses have the answer. When does the battery in an electric car reach the end of its life? Where does that battery go and what is it replaced with? People tell me that is an environmental problem we will have in ten or 15 years. How do we deal with that? Has anybody talked about this or looked at the plan? I am from a rural constituency. Farmers would say to me that they are the best guardians of the land. We have had an increase in our population. Last week, we had news that there were no tomatoes in the country, for whatever reason. If we keep going down this road, we could end up running out of other food products because we want farmers to cut back on their production, maybe rightly so. Maybe if all farmers were organic and produced half the food, did not use any fertilisers, and did it in an organic way, they might be just as well off, but who will produce the food for a country that has an increasing population? We are exporting food to other places in the world. How will we address all that?

I see this as a big project. Farmers want to buy into it but they are asking many questions. Young people want to buy into it. They actually have the guts to build their own houses, to install air-to-water heat pumps, to retrofit their houses to contribute, and to install microgeneration. What do we tell these people who we have already let down? We are telling them we will have all this done in 2050. That is probably all philosophy, but if we are charging tax, imposing carbon tax and raising fuel taxes to get people to stop using fuel, that money has to be used.

Local authorities have a huge stock of social housing. Many people in my constituency are burning turf. It will take 30 to 40 years to retrofit all those houses, with a huge budget, wherever it will come from, to put in air-to-water heat pumps and solar panels so that they actually meet the standards we will require. That is a reality.

At the moment the local authorities can hardly fix a lock on a door, never mind do anything else. I am being serious about this. It is something we can look at. The money comes out, a scheme of 40 houses in a local authority is delivered and they say that is great. That takes three years between design, procurement and getting it done. People pat themselves on the back over it. It is not a solution to the problem unless we are going to have the money to put into it. I do not know where that is going to come from. That is my rant.