Mary Lou McDonald (Dublin Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The Minister is engaging in a degree of historical revisionism in the context of energy prices within the State. Those prices shot up as a result of the adoption of a European Union directive that insisted upon deregulation of the market. The Minister is correct: those prices were increased to artificially high levels and then maintained in order to make what is a very small market alluring to major players. This is because we do not have the same economies of scale that obtain in larger continental countries. That is done, however, and the issue that now arises is whether the Government, on behalf of the people, is going to maintain in State ownership assets in strategically important areas. The energy sector is one of the latter. Before he listed what he intended to flog off, the Minister used to say that only so-called non-strategic assets would be sold. He really laboured that phrase. I am really struggling to understand - despite the standards they have kept while in government - how any Labour Party representative in his or her right mind could describe the area of energy as anything other than utterly strategic. The Minister is, however, clearly not open to my view in this regard. How much does he expect to realise from the sale of Bord Gáis Energy and the two ESB power plants in Spain and England?

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