Réada Cronin (Kildare North, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I will speak on the Sinn Féin amendment to address fuel poverty. It is a real and growing issue, especially with the financial hardship caused by Covid-19. Fuel poverty is real poverty and it is causing suffering for real people in the run-up to Christmas. Fuel poverty sees them dreading the new year. All of us here will be able to go home tonight and put the heating on. We will not have to go to bed early because it is cold. We will not have to watch our children shivering as they try to do their homework with a duvet around their shoulders. We will not have to keep our coats on until a certain hour of the day because we cannot afford to keep the heating on. We will not have the experience or indignity of not being able to keep our children warm in the 21st century. Lack of heating leads to damp, damp leads to mould and mould leads to illnesses such as asthma, bronchitis, acute and chronic respiratory illness and sinus infections. Tonight there will be parents taking out the inhalers and switching on nebulisers for their children because, thanks to fuel poverty, they do not have enough heat in their homes. It is a damning indictment of this Republic in the 21st century. It is Dickens meets Davos.

This year is especially tricky for fuel poverty because Covid is bringing swathes of new people into the cold because of loss of income. Given what I hear from my constituents in Kildare North, who are up early every morning, with some lucky to get to bed at all because they are carers, I am anxious that we should change the rule whereby people must have been on a jobseeker's payment for 15 months to claim fuel allowance. We must and can do better by people. It is a matter of political choice and political priorities. Let people heat their homes for what are modest sums, as Sinn Féin wants to do. It is value for money. Billions in public money are set on fire with State overruns, broadband that we will never own, bad accounting, lazy oversight and poor deals, as Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the seasonal political greenery want to do. All the time, they think it is fine not to pay student nurses despite the then Minister for Health, Deputy Harris, giving staged public assurances that they would be paid a fair wage. It is a steel fist inside a fuzzy glove.

It will be a cold Christmas for too many people. It will not be Good King Wenceslas but the Society of St. Vincent de Paul picking its way through the deep and crisp and even. We need this Sinn Féin amendment. I ask the Minister to please accept it. People need to heat their homes.

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