Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister for all that he has explained to us. I have a couple of quick questions. The first relates to an issue he touched on. How will those without a meter point reference number, MPRN, get their electricity grant? It seems from reading his submission that he has not quite figured out how that will be dispensed. Will he comment on whether that will definitely go to the Traveller community, which did not get to avail of it last time, and how that will be done? I will raise another matter again, which is a hot political topic at the moment. How will the Minister guarantee that there are no disconnections of those with prepaid meters or those with hefty bills from district heating systems, where much higher tariffs apply?

The main question that I want to ask is about the emergency generation plans and the €350 million that is being voted. Some €200 million has been spent and there is €150 million for the autumn. That is all done and dusted. It is necessary, but it bothers me that there is no scrutiny of why it is necessary. We need to revisit that. The Minister is looking far into the future to 2026, 2027 and 2028, when we may still require this type of plant, yet the State is continuing to connect data centres to the grid when we know that they are soaking up increasingly large volumes of energy. Should we not, at some point, stop scrambling to purchase extra equipment but instead stop the connection of extra data centres when we know that they are the cause of the increase in our energy use? The Minister mentioned the war in Ukraine, but the data centre issue is extraneous to that and we have information from the CRU that shows our electricity demand has grown by 9% over the past five years compared with 27 EU countries, which have approximately 0% growth in their energy demand. Ours is continually growing, which is clearly because of the growth of the data centre industry here.

My last question is about climate research. Why do we have money back from climate research? Why did we not spend the funding when we know from the biodiversity report that there is little hard evidence on the decline of many species in this country and that we should research that and spend the funding to examine how and why this is happening so that we can try to redress the problem and protect endangered species.