Eamon Ryan (Dublin South, Green Party)

I shall try to leave some time for Deputy Byrne, if I cannot share it with him.

I welcome the opportunity to have a debate in the House on the crucial issue of competitiveness and how to achieve it. We must be careful that we do not become populist and grab easy headlines but must work through what will work in a proper policy driven way. In my area of responsibility competitiveness is an important element. There are prices for energy and communications and a number of State agencies such as RTE, Inland Fisheries Ireland and other bodies must reduce and improve their cost competitiveness.

I shall consider the regulated markets first because they are probably the most significant in scale. Communications is a €4 billion industry; energy is much bigger again, being worth perhaps €6 billion to €8 billion or more. Energy is an important cost component within our industry although one must be careful with energy statistics. Figures from Sustainable Energy Ireland show that for 95% of businesses energy makes up less than 5% of their costs. It is not a main input cost in production for most companies although there are a number of energy intensive companies where we must be especially careful.

On the back of European legislation directives, going back about ten years, we introduced a regulatory system. I believe it works. I believe what the Minister of State, Deputy Kelleher said. The Government must be very careful not to jump in with its two big lumpen feet, pretending or thinking we can do regulation better than the people we appoint and legislate for to do that job.

In energy this system is working. Our prices are and have been high, largely because of our dependence on fossil fuel arising from a long series of decisions. However, our regulatory system is working and the competitive market the regulators are helping to deliver is starting to bring prices down significantly, getting us back into line and in shape with comparative countries in Europe. I became aware of that in spring last year at the height of this economic crisis when competitiveness was a key issue. The issue of energy prices came to the fore and we did a number of things. With the regulator we set about this on a proper regulatory market basis and following good policy guidance, looking to see what we could do to bring down prices, in particular for large energy users which are those most at risk from high energy prices. We made a series of measures that used good regulation and the ability of the ESB, with the help of some of the large payments it received in recent years from selling some assets, to bring about a non-discriminatory, non market-distorting market basis. It brought down prices. We put more than €0.5 billion to that task as well as the benefits that came from lower energy prices coming on international markets. The result in 2008-09, from second quarter to second quarter, was that Ireland had the second largest price reduction in gas prices to business across Europe-----

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