Darren O'Rourke (Meath East, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank People Before Profit-Solidarity for tabling this motion. This year, workers and families will be facing extraordinarily high energy costs at a time when most can least afford them. There have been over 30 price hike announcements from Irish energy suppliers since the start of the year, with some suppliers raising prices on multiple occasions. This is on top of other spiralling costs that the Government has completely failed to regulate, including rent, childcare, insurance and the basket of shopping; the list goes on. The Government does not seem to recognise the real hardship many people are facing due to these constant price hikes and has failed to bring forward any meaningful solutions for people.

Euro finance ministers met in Luxembourg on Monday to discuss the energy crisis and we heard calls for strong co-ordinated action on this. Some EU member states, such as Spain, France and Italy, are already acting unilaterally and with appropriate urgency. In Ireland, the Government sits on its hands. It is essential emergency action is taken here to protect households from crippling energy price hikes. Whether it is through the consumer Acts or another mechanism, Ministers cannot sit on their hands as people go cold, hungry or potentially die as they struggle to cope with heating bills this winter. These huge price rises are an emergency and need to be treated as such in the budget announcement next week.

There are measure the Government can take. Last year, I published a Bill that would ban utility disconnections during the fuel allowance season. This is an important protection that should be introduced. We cannot have a position where those facing financial difficulty have their gas or electricity cut off in the middle of winter for failure to meet their bills on time. Even having the threat of disconnections hanging over families is incredibly stressful. Yesterday, at a committee meeting, we heard from representatives of the Commission for Regulation of Utilities on this issue. Other European countries, such as the Netherlands, Finland and Belgium, have winter disconnection bans and such a protection should also be introduced here.

The electricity public service obligation, PSO, must be reformed. It should be levied on overall demand, not peak demand as is now the case. Residential consumers are responsible for approximately 42% of peak demand but only 28% of total demand. Industrial consumers, meanwhile, are responsible for 47% of peak demand and 44% of overall demand. Despite contributing less to overall demand than industrial users, residential electricity users' outsized contribution to peak demand means they are apportioned an outsized share of the PSO. We want to change this to ensure large electricity users, such as data centres, pay their fair share of the PSO based on their overall demand for electricity, rather than ordinary households shouldering the heaviest burden.

To add absolute insult to injury for families, the Government still intends to carry on, with complete disregard, with carbon tax hikes, adding to the burden on families, with an extra €1.50 on a fill of motor fuel, an extra €13 on the average gas bill and an extra €20 per tank of home heating oil. What is the Government's argument for this? We have heard the money will be used to offset carbon impact and we need it anyway to invest in climate projects. The real world is a foreign place for this Government. The truth, of course, is that welfare supports go nowhere near covering the impact of these hikes. What about the promised climate action spend? How many houses have been retrofitted in the past year? The number is little or none. How many cold homes have been insulated? How many heat pumps have been installed? It is a fraction of what was committed to and an even smaller fraction of what is needed.

How many new public transport routes have been provided? There has been none, not even one. I have repeatedly seen a response from the National Transport Authority indicating "2021 does not include provision for the introduction of new or improved services in these areas". In my county I can think of communities like Carlanstown, which appears in our local newspaper this week and has no service. Kentstown is a village that had a service years ago, when there was just one housing estate in the place, and now it has no service, despite having a far greater population. Elsewhere, existing services to Dublin City University have been reduced.

All of this is happening while the Government is subsidising millionaires to drive electric supercars and running our energy system to the brink of collapse to facilitate big technology foreign direct investment. It is really a case of one rule for some and another for the rest of us. This Government just does not get it. It is out of touch, out of ideas and with any good luck for the Irish people, it is running out of time fast.

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