Róisín Shortall (Dublin North West, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I am glad to have an opportunity to contribute to this debate because the manner in which we tackle or fail to tackle climate change has major implications for our future social and economic development. It affects the sustainability of our environment and our economy. It also affects several major employment sectors, including agriculture, tourism and multinationals. It is critical to the long-term development of our country. We know that climate change has multiple aspects. It is undoubtedly a global issue. It involves all major industrialised countries and those big countries have a particular responsibility, given the impact their industrial policies have on climate. The energy policy of multinationals is absolutely critical. Europe has a key role to play and Ireland should be much more vocal in Europe’s response to the issue. The West's exploitation of developing countries is a major contributor to climate change. There are many aspects to the problem.

Ireland should be leading the way on clean energy and we must play our part. We know what needs to be done: the key to tackling climate change is improving energy efficiency and ensuring that a much greater share of energy sources comes from renewables. Last month, the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland, SEAI, published a report detailing the measures required to achieve targets set down for Ireland on use of renewable energy and energy efficiency. If we do not take sufficient action now, Ireland faces very substantial non-compliance fines in 2020, running to hundreds of millions of euro. Not only will this cost us very significantly in a financial way, but we will continue to be stuck with an ever-increasing reliance on imported energy, with ordinary households and businesses paying exorbitantly high utility bills and, of most concern, the continued damage to our planet by unacceptably high CO2 emissions. While some very welcome progress has been made, the improvement in energy efficiency and the switch to renewable energy has not been anything like fast enough.

The grant system operated by the SEAI has been very welcome. It is generally well run and the public values the grants but the schemes are still not without their flaws, particularly in how they relate to low income groups. The qualifying criteria for the warmer homes scheme should be significantly broadened to include groups who do not necessarily qualify for the fuel allowance or certain social welfare payments, for instance, those with a medical card or those outside the income tax net. The provision of replacement windows should be included in the grant scheme. The SEAI could set down criteria for the circumstances in which window replacement would be permissible or not. It does not make sense to fund heating controls and installation when so much of the heat in the house is escaping through faulty, old, single-glazed windows. There is still a requirement for up-front cash from the householder. It would be far better for uptake if home owners had the option of paying for their share of upgrade works through their utility bills. This has been proposed for some time but is not yet a feature of the scheme. There is no reason for people not to get the upgrade works done now and then pay as they go when experiencing the savings in energy costs.

A similar barrier exists on the uptake of electric cars as the up-front cost of these vehicles is quite prohibitive and unaffordable for most families. There needs to be much greater allocation of resources for local authority homes because many of these have very poor insulation and are not at all efficient. Many of the tenants in these homes are low income families and it costs them dearly to maintain adequate heat in their homes. At the time I very much welcomed the pilot schemes funded by this Minister. They were very good and very effective. A couple of these pilot schemes, to insulate local authority housing, were run in my constituency, in Ballymun and brought significant dividends for everybody concerned. The homes were much warmer for the families living there, they reduced the cost of living for those families and they were highly energy efficient. They were very welcome, very successful and should be expanded.

The SEAI needs to play a key role in this and to adjust the type of approach it has been taking. It states that 75,000 homes and businesses will need to be upgraded for improved energy efficiency every year between now and 2020 if Ireland is to achieve the 2020 energy efficiency target. It also states that energy efficiency improvements are required in vehicle stocks, in large industry, the public sector and in small and medium enterprises. Between 200 MW and 250 MW of additional wind capacity must be installed every year up to 2020. Approximately 270 MW of wind capacity was installed in 2014 but the average installed capacity over the past five years has been only 177 MW. Supply of between 440 million and 508 million litres of biofuels must be secured for blending with fossil fuels for transport in order to increase the biofuel consumption levels to 8% by 2020. In 2014, some 167 million litres of biofuels were used in transport so we are a very long way off those targets.

The roll-out of electric vehicles must be greatly accelerated to the point where within five years electric vehicles must account for 20% of all new cars sold in Ireland. To put that in perspective, in 2015, electric cars accounted for 0.23% of all new car sales, comprising a total of 562 vehicles sold that year. The requirement is for a hundredfold increase in electric vehicles. That is a very significant request. There has been a great deal of slippage in that over recent years and it will require a very determined effort to get close to the targets. A total of 300,000 homes, or 3,000 services or public sector buildings, or 200 large industrial sites must be encouraged to install renewable heat options such as biomass boilers, solar, thermal and biomass combined heat and power, CHP, systems.

A renewable heat incentive policy has been recommended as part of the draft bioenergy action plan.

I refer to the Ireland Strategic Investment Fund. At the same time as we are attempting to address all of the arguments, one would have to ask why the fund is investing in some of the most carbon-intensive activities on the planet. One interesting contribution I read recently was an analysis of the annual report of the Ireland Strategic Investment Fund. According to Joseph Curtin of the school of accounting and business in UCC and the Irish Institute for International and European affairs and Dr. Paul Dean of the environmental research institute in UCC, Ireland is investing millions in carbon-intensive energy companies. The market value of these holdings in 2014 was €72 million, spread over fossil fuel distribution, oil and gas exploration and refining and petrochemical industries in shale, oil and gas and coal. Most of the investments are in North American companies and the remainder are Russian and European. We should speak with a single voice. Our decisions on the fund are in direct contradiction to what we should be doing in regard to climate change. We need to change that investment approach.

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