Olivia Mitchell (Dublin South, Fine Gael)

I support this very timely motion. Global warming and practices such as climate change are slow impacting, difficult to identify and hard to detect, so it is very easy for us to bury our heads in the sand, as we have done for far too long. We could all look the other way, when there was no clear and immediate catastrophic impact on our way of life and no result of our indifference to our continued dependence on fossil fuels as almost our only energy source in Ireland. The rest of the population could be forgiven for hoping that we could all go on acting as we did in the past, but a Government cannot do that. The purpose of a Government is to show leadership and to prepare the country and the population for major and far-reaching changes — the undeniable and unavoidable lifestyle changes and economic changes that face us as the result of the dwindling of oil supplies.

Our Government throughout has shown a failure of leadership and has sat on its hands in the past nine years in office. If we could hope to deny the reality of climate change, we cannot deny the reality of rising oil prices. Oil has reached $70 a barrel, which was inconceivable even five years ago, and it will continue to rise inexorably no matter what we do. It is time to take our heads out of the sand and, whether the cause of rising prices is dwindling supplies, global instability, minor wars here, there and everywhere, or a combination of those, the reality is our economy is in imminent and growing danger and we are becoming increasingly uncompetitive. We are becoming so more quickly than anybody else because while almost everyone is impacted on by rising prices of oil and dwindling supplies, we are more affected because we are more dependent on imported fossil fuels than almost any other country, certainly more than any other in Europe.

In recent times, the Government has paid lip-service to conservation and alternative energy, but the dynamic, imaginative and crisis-aware response that has been needed has been absent. Our European neighbours have been quietly preparing for a post-fossil fuel world with twin-track policies, based on the one hand on energy conservation and, on the other, on identifying alternative and, preferably, renewable energy sources. Our Government, however, has done nothing, or virtually nothing, on energy conservation in the past nine years.

We have had the biggest build in the history of the country, increasing the number of houses by 500,000 in the past nine years. It is probably the biggest build we will ever have, but it has been wasted in terms of energy conservation with no attempt whatever to improve insulation standards from their woefully low level. That was because the Government listened to interests in the building industry and ensured no attempt was made to move to better building techniques. All those houses and apartment blocks were built with the old standards of insulation and without any requirements for innovative measures such as the installation of solar panels. No prescience was shown to prepare the country for the EU obligatory energy rating which will astound people when it is visited upon them in their badly insulated homes.

During that same period, car ownership exploded, not only because people became richer, as the Taoiseach likes to tell us, but because they had jobs. To get to those jobs they had to have a car. In some cases they had to have two, especially if they were one of those unfortunate, forgotten families who had settled in the periphery around our cities, especially around the city of Dublin. We have a staggering 2 million cars on our roads, guzzling petrol, increasing congestion and polluting the atmosphere.

Transport is our biggest energy user, and huge savings of precious oil could be made if the many thousands who use a car could transfer to public transport. Travelling through congested cities and towns at 9 km/h is not just stressful for people, it is also the most wasteful use imaginable of the precious oil resources that could be put to more productive use in the economy and which will increasingly be needed for more productive uses, particularly in an economy that has no alternative energy resources.

Meanwhile, an ever-growing number of heavy goods vehicles pour onto our roads to distribute goods to and from every corner of Ireland. With petrol getting daily more expensive and the writing now clearly on the wall, one would think the Government would have an aggressive rail freight policy to ensure that what could be moved by rail was moved by rail. Instead, it is not so much that it has not got an aggressive policy but that it has no policy at all on rail freight. It has sat by and allowed all movement of container traffic out of Dublin port by rail to be abandoned. No rail freight comes out of the port. Throughout the country, capacity is being decommissioned and sold off in a way that will make it almost impossible to recommission it in future when the petrol eventually runs out.

The Government has promised public transport. It would make a major contribution to energy conservation if more people used public transport. The solution being offered is electrified rail, which is right and proper. Be it the DART, metro or Luas, that is exactly what we want. Where is the energy supply to come from, however, to power those facilities? Not enough energy is being generated at the moment to meet today's needs, never mind the needs for the metro, DART and Luas. We have neither the energy source nor the generating capacity, and there seems to be no plan or even an awareness of a need for a plan.

Yesterday we read of Airtricity's attempts to interest British MPs in its proposal for a sub-sea grid to distribute wind-generated energy around Europe. This is the kind of bold, imaginative solution that should come from Government. It should not be left to private individuals to lobby other countries. At the very least, the Government should grasp, drive and support alternative energy solutions like this one abroad, and at home we must push the biofuel switch in every way we can to ensure Ireland is not left out, abandoned and in the dark when the oil runs out. Other countries will find solutions and we, the island country, will be left behind and our economy in tatters unless the Government has a major shift in its mindset and approach to energy conservation and alternative energy.

Probably no other issue facing this country is more important. All other problems require a dynamic, thriving economy to provide solutions, but such an economy requires energy and we are running out of that. The Fine Gael motion we have tabled contains some ideas to encourage the switch to the use of biofuels. Creating a sustainable market for biofuels though this series of initiatives will in itself create the dynamic to ensure ongoing research in the industry into alternative energies and optimum technologies which this country so desperately and urgently requires.

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