Duncan Smith (Dublin Fingal, Labour) | Oireachtas source

The Minister of State's statement this morning hit the right tone at the start. It was regretful and there was even a hint of contrition at the fact that we are a laggard in terms of meeting our climate change targets within the European family. She mentioned that we are not alone and that Luxembourg, Malta and the Netherlands are also in a similar boat. We may not be alone but we are in a minority - a sorry minority - of countries that are falling way behind. While the Minister of State's statement hit the right note in that regard, in the sixth paragraph she stated that it is important to point out that the funds for Estonia and Denmark will be used to accelerate deployment of renewable electricity in their jurisdictions in line with their national energy and climate plans. To be honest, that actually compounds the shame of having to pay €50 million in Irish taxpayers' money to make up for the shortfall in our own targets. Not only will that money leave our shores where it could be invested in decarbonising our economy and improving our renewable energy resources, it is going to countries that are already miles ahead of us so we are going to fund them to go even further in terms of their own renewable energy resources. Fair play to them, as they are ahead of us. This will probably not permeate down to the man and woman on the street - the people who will come to our Zoom clinics and contact our offices. If we tried to explain this to the ordinary man and woman on the street, they would be shocked that we are paying this amount of money in penalties that will go to the best boys and girls in the class to allow them to become even better. It is shocking.

Deputy O'Rourke raised a fundamental point at the end of his contribution. The renewable energy that is coming on stream will not be State-owned. It will be privatised so we will be going from big oil to big wind - I hope we can find another phrase. This is where we are going. The Government needs to tell us how much of the renewable energy coming on stream will be siphoned off for other multinational corporations such as those running data centres that are entering into prepaid contracts with companies that own wind farms to siphon off up to 15%, 20% or 25% of the energy created in order to power data centres, which are huge carbon emitters and very poor in terms of creating jobs. There is a structure here that will only get bigger and will be bad for the worker, the economy and the Irish taxpayer because we will continue to pay these exorbitant penalties to countries that are doing things far better than us.

Another related element in terms of carbon emissions is transport. I am moving away slightly from renewable energy generation to the emissions from our transport sector. We went from level 5 to level 2. I know Deputy O'Rourke from Meath and Deputy Whitmore from north Wicklow travel to Dublin. I bet they had similar conversations as I did coming as I do from north County Dublin - "janey mack, travel just absolutely shot up overnight when we left level 5." Everyone was back in their cars heading into cities for work or shopping. Our air quality is disgraceful having gone back to 1980s levels when smog was a fact of life in Dublin and our major towns. Traffic is back. Unless we go back into level 5, traffic is back to the worst levels and has been for the past number of years. It was sold by the Government as some indicator that the economy was recovering and everyone was back to work. It is great that the economy was recovering at a particular point but we are all in cars with the target of 2030 for everyone to be driving electric or hybrid cars coming down the tracks. I asked the Government in a parliamentary question whether there are any plans for a scrappage scheme supported by the State to allow the hundreds of thousands of people who own diesel or petrol cars to scrap these cars and over the course of the next five, six or seven years get an electric or hybrid car in an affordable way. The answer to my question was a flat "No" so the Government is not really interested in tackling this at either a micro or macro level, as is proven by this. I am really concerned that in 2021, we will all be here again talking about the next statistical transfer and the next piece of accounting sleight of hand, which is shameful.

See this speech in context