Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I do not see how the Minister can say that they will be protected when they clearly are not protected as it stands and I cannot see any measures here to protect the 400,000 households living in fuel poverty. Many or most of them cannot afford to do the retrofit they would like to do, which would improve their quality of life. They just cannot afford it and in some cases they would not be allowed to do it by their landlord, private or public. How can the Minister say it is fair to impose additional costs on people already suffering fuel poverty? I cannot see how he can possibly justify it. Nor do I see how the Minister can justify allowing bus and train fares to go up and the subsidies to public transport to go down. I do not see how he can justify that and say that the Government is serious about climate change.

On gas as a transitional fuel, in the past week the European Investment Bank has made a decision that, as of 2021, it will not lend any more money for fossil fuel projects. That includes gas. The gas industry is going ballistic about that because it was looking for special exceptions for gas on the basis that it is a transitional fuel but the European Investment Bank said no to that. As a result, fossil fuel lending will come to an end as of 2021. We, on the other hand, have put into the European Union as a priority project of common interest a liquid natural gas infrastructure to import fracked gas from the United States that will lock us into importing one of the most toxic CO2 emitting forms of fossil fuel for decades, long after we are supposed to have reached carbon neutrality and long after the environment needs us to reach carbon neutrality. The Government needs to take a long hard look at whether its policies are serious in addressing this emergency.

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