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

To put it simply and bluntly, energy poverty is going to kill several thousand of our most vulnerable citizens this winter. So-called climate action in the form of the carbon tax is going to kill many thousands of our most vulnerable and elderly citizens this winter unless the Government does something about it. That is what we are appealing to the Minister of State to do.

We are edging our way out of a public health emergency during which 5,000 people died tragically. The pandemic prompted the Government, correctly, to spend €24 billion to prevent deaths in a public health emergency. Our motion asserts that this is a public health emergency. In exactly the same way that Covid-19 was a public health emergency and required an unprecedented response to prevent unnecessary deaths of the vulnerable, this is a public health emergency but it is not one that is confined to one year. It is an ongoing public health emergency where the sick, the elderly and the poor die as a result of the lack of resources available to them to heat their homes. The Government has a responsibility to recognise that public health emergency in the same way as it recognised the Covid emergency and make unprecedented efforts to ensure unnecessary deaths do not happen among our older, more vulnerable and poorer sections of our society.

Those who are vulnerable do not make up a small cohort. The Society of St. Vincent de Paul estimates that 19% of people - almost one fifth of our entire population - are cutting back on the use of electricity and heating because they cannot afford it. Some of those people die as a result. Those deaths and the hardship and suffering of those who must turn down the heat and shiver in the cold this winter are the Government's responsibility. It is something it can address but if its amendment is an indication of its response, it is clearly not going to address it. It will allow unnecessary deaths to continue. It will fail to recognise that this is a public health emergency and will allow the vulnerable, the poor and the elderly to suffer and some of them to die because it will not recognise how serious this issue is.

This is a year-on-year public health emergency but it has got substantially worse. We must, therefore, fear what the potential casualties will be at the end of the winter season if the Government does not act. We are talking about two, three and four energy price hikes over the past year. This results in €100, €400 or up to €500 per year in additional costs for electricity and heating. Overwhelmingly, the burden of those increases will fall on the people who have the least ability to do anything about them, not only because they are on low incomes but also because they are disproportionately concentrated in houses with extremely poor insulation and have to use disproportionate amounts of energy to keep their houses warm. In the case of social housing tenants, they have no control over the level of insulation in their homes because it is up to the local authority and Government to retrofit their homes.

It is nauseating to have the Government in its amendment and, again, in the Minister of State's speech suggest that the retrofit programme is anything other than pitiful. In respect of our motion, Deputy Paul Murphy was incorrect. It was too generous in respect of the target the Minister of State said he was trying to meet. The revised Estimates for 2021 showed that only €25 million was put into the social housing retrofit programme. The target of 1,670 retrofits was not met. It had to be revised down once or twice during the course of the year because the Government and local authorities failed spectacularly to meet it. This is against a total social housing stock of 137,000. Even in the much-lauded and trumpeted national development plan, the Government is only proposing to retrofit one quarter - 37,000 homes - of the entire social housing stock by 2030. Three quarters of those in social housing will not have their homes retrofitted at the end of the national development plan. The amount of investment is pathetic. In terms of the private grants available for private homeowners, the maximum grant someone can get is just under €15,000. Not surprisingly, the SEAI's targets for home retrofits were not met either because, of course, the actual cost of retrofitting a home is anywhere between €35,000 and €70,000 if someone wants to achieve a BER A rating.

The Government is failing spectacularly and is demonstrating no willingness to implement the just transition, which means not unloading the cost of carbon taxes and climate measures on the people who cannot afford them. People who are rich can of course retrofit their homes. They can manage to pay €70,000 but how on earth are people living in social housing, low-paid workers or pensioners going to get €35,000 or €70,000 to retrofit their homes when the grants available are about €15,000? They cannot do so. For this reason, we need to dramatically increase investment, which, by the way, would save millions. I do not have the time to set out how.

Our proposal for the forthcoming budget is to retrofit 50,000 homes per year, moving up to 100,000 per annum. The savings would be dramatic. We would save about €206 million per year for every 50,000 homes we retrofit. In the meantime, until the Government steps up to the mark in terms of retrofitting people's homes so they can reduce their heating and energy use, it is nothing short of punishment to impose further increases in the carbon tax on people who have no control over the level of heat and energy they must use in their homes to keep themselves warm and, in some cases, alive. It is criminal to continue to impose carbon taxes on these people.

We should not only defer the carbon tax increase, we should abolish it because it is fundamentally regressive. We should impose it on the real big polluters, the beef barons and big corporations that are responsible for huge amounts of emissions. We should not impose it on the poor, pensioners, the sick and the vulnerable, which is what the Government is proposing to do with this carbon tax increase. If it recognised that there was an emergency with Covid-19, took unprecedented measures and made levels of unprecedented State intervention to match the public health emergency, by God, it would be justified in declaring an emergency in energy costs and energy supply. It has the legal mechanisms to do so and impose maximum unit prices for energy and electricity. Why will it not do that? It would be unconscionable if the Government refused to do it.

I ask the Government to think again about what it is doing. Has it learned anything from the Covid-19 pandemic about the importance of public health and how we are all in this together? Are we seriously going to allow to continue the obscenity and scandal of the poor, vulnerable, elderly and sick dying because of a lack of heating in their homes and the financial pressures the Government is willing to impose on them through carbon taxes and absolutely obscene levels of energy pricing from an energy sector that has become completely consumed by profit? The price of energy supplies is being driven up by the greed of entities like the big information technology companies that want to build data centres. The Government wants to facilitate them but they are driving up prices and reducing the level of available energy.

That is a demonstration of Government priorities. The big multinationals come first but the sick, elderly, poor and vulnerable will die as a consequence. I appeal to the Government to withdraw its amendments and support the measures we are proposing in the motion.

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