Tommy Broughan (Dublin North East, Labour)

Mr. Helm has continually warned of the danger of governments using the regulator as a mudguard. Regulators have provided a mudguard for this Government over the last ten years in order to evade their primary responsibility of keeping the country's lights on. I will quote briefly from what Mr. Helm forcefully said in a similar article about Britain, which appeared recently in the New Statesman. He said:

For many years it has been fashionable to believe that if only politicians and regulators kept their hands off, the market would solve the problems. Supply always equals demand, it is just that the price has to go high enough. But this excessive market optimism is not only undermined by the evidence, it undermines the market itself. Competitive markets work best in the context of proper policy frameworks. Governments will always intervene in energy markets. The cost of market failures for the environment, security of supply, monopoly and the rest of the economy are just too great. It is not government or markets, it is governments setting an appropriate energy policy framework within which companies operate.

Is that not the basis of what has been wrong with this Government's energy policies for the last ten years and particularly for the past five years? I recall the headline of an article in the Financial Times this time last year, which read "Energy is too important to be left to the magic of the market". Many people do not seem to realise this.

I have already tabled an amendment to the Energy (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill. I intend to table a similar amendment to section 10 of the Bill currently before us, which would require the Minister to lay before the House any policy directives, including the aforementioned relevant targets, and to review them regularly. Our basic objective is that regulators should be properly answerable to the Irish people.

Section 10 makes it clear that a similar public policy instrument does not exist in Northern Ireland. That is because Northern Ireland's legislation is coming from the Thatcherite canon. The section specifically states that the Minister shall not interfere. There is a certain hostility to policy directives as configured in the Irish system. As in many other matters, the British government left Northern Ireland's energy development mainly to its own devices over the past 20 years since the onset of Thatcherism.

I want to refer briefly to energy security. I am sure other Deputies have received the helpful e-mail briefing, which we receive almost daily, from the energy commissioner. I commend the commissioner, Mr. Tom Reeves, and his staff from the CER. According to the last few such e-mails, levels of capacity and peak demand are getting dangerously close. On one evening recently, the gap was less than 100 MW.

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