Dáil debates

Wednesday, 13 October 2021

Financial Resolutions 2021 - Financial Resolution No. 2: General (Resumed)

 

3:40 pm

Photo of Thomas PringleThomas Pringle (Donegal, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I would like to say I am disappointed by the lack of green vision in yesterday's budget but, unfortunately, I am not, despite the fact that the country's Green Party supposedly forms a part of the Government proposing this budget. The Minister, Deputy Eamon Ryan, must have been joking when he said the budget would be "very green". A different type of green it might have been because I see no evidence of that, but the lack of just transition and good environmental policy in budget 2022 is no laughing matter.

Yesterday the Minister, Deputy Donohoe, said that carbon taxation is "the single most effective climate policy", which is complete and utter nonsense. Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil and, most interestingly of all, the Green Party seem intent on leading the population to associate environmentalism with unfair taxation which disproportionately affects lower-income families, causing an understandable resistance and resentment towards the green movement. It is a smart tactic, and I am not naive enough to think that the Government does not know what it is doing when it does this. Such carbon taxes do nothing but push people into fuel poverty and actually do very little to make any sort of real change. They are not an effective way to stop people owning and driving fuel-run cars. They only force people to pay more for the cars they have to drive. I said yesterday that this disproportionately affects my county of Donegal, and it does. There is simply no public transport available in much of the county, and for many people electric cars are not an option either. There are, for example, no electric car charging points on any of the country's islands, such as Arranmore, so what the Government is doing is just forcing people to pay extortionate rates for fuel they have no choice but to use.

I invite Government Deputies to take a look at a map of the west of Ireland. They might be surprised to find that it really does exist, and electric chargers are few and far between. I will also take this opportunity to point out that €90 million was allocated to aviation yesterday, and I will not even get started on the data centres the Government is so keen to set up.

If it is looking for the single most effective climate policy it could implement, I would advise it to look to those centres.

If the Government were serious about tackling climate change, it would consider real structural change on a much larger level. I see no reason that Ireland could not achieve energy independence in the next ten years using, for example, only wind and hydropower. More than a decade ago, a wind and hydropower project was initiated by Spirit of Ireland in Kilcar, County Donegal. The project looked to harness Ireland's huge wind energy potential by using our natural coastal valleys to provide hydropower storage reservoirs. Wind farms were to be used to pump seawater into the reservoirs, which would then be passed through turbines generating massive amounts of power. The Minister, Deputy Eamon Ryan, should be able to recall this project, given that he was the Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources at the time. I find it absolutely incredible that, more than 12 years later and in a similar ministerial portfolio, the best climate policy he can come up with is a carbon tax. It surely is laughable stuff.

The Spirit of Ireland wind and hydropower project, which was privately funded, had the potential not only to reduce our dependence on imported energy and fossil fuels but also to create jobs and offer enormous economic benefit to the country. That particular project fell through at the time but if the Government committed to funding a similar project, the benefits could be endless in terms of energy independence. It would require two hydropower storage reservoirs at a cost of €800 million each, but this would have the potential to save up to €15 billion in fossil fuel imports in little more than five years. The expertise and technology are there and similar projects have been done elsewhere. All that is required is commitment and a bit of ambition from the Government. It is time to think bigger, at the very least bigger than a carbon tax, which is just a lazy way to address the tremendous environmental crisis we have on our hands. Ireland has the potential to be a world leader on energy independence. The Minister missed out on this opportunity before and I urge him not to make the same mistake again. I ask him to show that he is about more than just surface and photo opportunities. He has a chance to prove he really cares about environmental issues and the future of our children.

Yesterday, I called this budget a missed opportunity. After a further read of it, it is very disheartening and incredibly frustrating to see how right I was. The rent restrictions, cessation of evictions and nationalisation of private hospitals that occurred over the past 18 months showed that the Government has the capacity to take steps to address the housing and health crisis in a serious way. How can it possibly see the immense benefit of that, and how positively it affected so many people's lives, and then turn around and say, "No, we do not want that; let us go back to the way things were"? It seems as if Ministers much prefer when our health and housing systems are in a state of crisis, perhaps because of the photo opportunities it affords and the chance to do useless stuff and claim they are working to address it.

How many times has the private sector relied on the public sector to bail it out? This surely demonstrates a huge flaw in the private sector, yet the Government goes on investing heavily in it, to the detriment of our public services, and saying that is the solution. To whom do the political classes respond and for whom do they work? We never saw the bankers having to protest outside Leinster House to get what they wanted back in 2008. I doubt they even had to ask. On the other hand, for how many years have the people of Donegal been raising the mica issue? Yet they are still forced to march in Dublin to have their voices heard. How long is it since the Taoiseach or the Tánaiste visited the families affected and told them that the people of Donegal would not be treated any differently from the people in Leinster who benefited from the pyrite redress scheme? It is two years since the Tánaiste, who was then Taoiseach, visited those families and spoke those empty words.

The question must be asked as to whether the measures announced yesterday are new initiatives or just old, empty promises. We were told, for instance, that there will be free GP care for children aged six and seven. However, budget 2020 included a commitment to free GP care for children under eight. In effect, the Government has announced the exact same measure it undertook to implement two years ago. The roll-out of free contraception, to give another example, is nothing new. It has been promised for years, with the previous Minister for Health, Deputy Harris, committing to deliver it by the end of 2019. In addition, it is clear that the greenest part of this budget is the constant recycling of old promises. That is the most we can look for in it.

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