Dáil debates

Thursday, 30 November 2006

Electricity Regulation (Amendment) (Single Electricity Market) Bill 2006: Second Stage (Resumed)

 

4:00 pm

Photo of Tommy BroughanTommy Broughan (Dublin North East, Labour)

We have had the opposite of what we might have expected. Despite the trumpeted market opening in 2005, of which I spoke, there is no choice for our household consumers. The Government is not one that delivers choice, certainly as far as electricity is concerned. It has not been able to do that so far.

The botched 1992 privatisation in Northern Ireland also left consumers there with high electricity prices. It is no wonder that in a debate in the European Parliament last week, my colleague, Proinsias De Rossa, MEP, and many other MEPs asked what is privatisation for if it cannot develop security and choice for consumers and if the consumers in many markets are left with a private monopoly and extremely high prices because the private monopolist is not investing enough. This is what we experienced in the case of Eircom, where the company is privatised and investment just does not take place.

Not alone is the level of Irish energy policy at an astonishingly high and unacceptable level — Deloitte & Touche reported that in its estimation 17%, almost one in five, of Irish people are fuel poor — but also businesses right across the country are complaining bitterly about the devastating effect of sky-rocketing energy prices on them and on the international competitiveness of the country, and hence there is an apparent rowing back.

Like a few other Members of the House, I had the distinction of sitting in the economics class of the great Dr. Garret FitzGerald. Dr. FitzGerald was famous for a formulation of inflation when he was Taoiseach, but last March Ms Regina Finn, the former CER commissioner, used a Dr. FitzGerald style formula. She told me that level of electricity prices in the all-island market would continue rising — we have that to look forward to — but would be lower than they would have been without the all-Island market. Is that not a wonderful formula?

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