Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputy O'Rourke for his kind words. I am blushing now. I had better get out of the place quickly before something goes wrong, but I appreciate his comments very much.

I will speak to a couple of points on the electricity credit. First, I again need to look to my officials here who have been responsible. It was initiated and designed in our Department and delivered by our Department with the ESB. It is another example of the State doing something well. It has worked effectively. It is low cost in terms of the application, and some may argue about whether it was right to apply it universally or if it could have been targeted. The case for a universal credit was that we still have significant issues. There are 278,000 households in arrears on electricity bills, and 171,000 in arrears on gas bills. The main benefit we saw in the past three years when we applied it was that it shrunk that arrears element significantly. Given that gas and electricity prices are still high compared with levels before the war in Ukraine, I think it is appropriate. It is also appropriate that it is clearly being tapered down and out. It cannot be permanent. These are extraordinary measures for extraordinary times. The approach is correct, and its ongoing wind-down is also correct.

I turn to the tweak and the changes that came. I think the provision, where it was households with less than 150 kW per quarter, is appropriate. They are not households where you are effectively living in the house. To address the Deputy's concern, anyone who is recognised as a vulnerable customer or a hardship case will still benefit from the payment even with very low usage. In a case where someone with very low energy use is in real difficulty because of it, they should first and foremost contact their energy supplier. We had approximately 100 complaints to the Commission for Regulation of Utilities and all of those were solved satisfactorily. Out of 2.5 million households we had 100 examples where that might be a problem and I am told all of those were solved to the satisfaction of the householder, so we can manage that within the overall scheme.