Martin Kenny (Sligo-Leitrim, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

This Bill is an emergency benefits scheme to give relief to families that have been victims of significant price increases across the board. Recently in my constituency, we held an online meeting of people who were concerned about the cost of living crisis they were facing. It could be broken down into a number of areas. Energy was one of the main ones - we are trying to do something practical about it today - but the major one was the cost of housing. Rent in particular is a significant problem for people, as is the cost of childcare. For people living in rural areas who must travel to work, fuel is a significant problem. Its cost has gone through the roof.

We need to get a grip on this situation and recognise that the Government has to play an active role and try to support people through this period. I hope that it will be a short period. A concern I have about this Bill is that it is one-off legislation. We are going to the trouble of creating a Bill for a one-off payment when we should instead be providing for a regulation to allow this payment to be repeated if a similar crisis arises in future. Doing this would not place any extra cost on the Exchequer.

The Bill is a blunt instrument that gives the payment to everyone, even people who are well off and do not need it. An amendment could be made so that people in those circumstances could divert their payments to charities, which would then disburse the money to people in greater need of it.

I take slight issue with Deputy Cowen's proposal regarding the ESB. I have bad memories of Eircom, as will many of us who bought shares that ended up being worth nothing. We were told at the time that the only way to get broadband provision was to privatise the company and that the State was the block. Of all things, it was broadband that we could not get a hold of at that time. Here we are today in a very similar position. Nothing has changed. Before the State considers doing anything with the very valuable assets and companies that have been built up by hard work over many generations, any such move needs to be thought out very carefully. The mistakes of the past in that regard should never be repeated. While regulation may play a role in all of that, at the end of the day, we need hands-on State control of the company in an island economy like ours, which does not have access to neighbours that can provide energy to us as freely as would be the case if we had land borders with them. It would be a very retrograde step to go in the proposed direction.

To go back to the Bill, we support it but it does not go nearly far enough to deal with the many problems people have. At the least, it needs to be recognised that the one thing we could do very simply, and which I implore the Government and Minister to do, is to amend the legislation to allow this measure to be repeated in the future.

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