Bernard Durkan (Kildare North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

It is interesting that we are having this debate. It is good that the original, much maligned measure to provide support to electricity users was mooted in good time. The Government now has an opportunity to tweak that measure to address issues as they emerge, because they are going to be much more severe than was anticipated some months ago. It must be remembered that the Government has not been idle. Some €48 billion had to be spent in supporting the community, the business sector, employers and employees in order to ensure that the country stayed afloat. That was money well spent. Not every country was able to do it, but it was possible to do it here.

We must recognise that it was not an easy time. Decisions had to be taken. The previous speaker made an interesting point regarding decisions. We need our own sources of energy, and we should have acted on this requirement years ago. For some unknown reason, we did not do that. The Ceann Comhairle will remember when I was targeted by people with a great deal of money who tried to ensure that I did not get re-elected because I was supporting the concept of having our own energy resources and of developing them.

Of course, there were objections in certain cases. Some of those objections were based on facts, but some were not. One thing was certain, though. That was the time to start building for our energy requirements. It was eventually decided that we would go out to sea and into the middle of the Atlantic or whatever the case may be. That is not the way to do the business. We have no chance of delivering power in ten years to the extent required from alternative energy sources, including wind generation from the Atlantic. We have no chance whatsoever of doing that because we would have needed to have that investment process already up and running eight to ten years ago.

What will we do next, then? Will we rely on our colleagues across the EU and the UK or where will we get our energy supplies at a price that we can afford when we need them? That latter point is the important aspect. I refer to being able to get energy when we need it and to how we can control the supply. The only way to control energy supplies is for us to own them. It is possible to do that. It is not rocket science. It has been done before and, undoubtedly, it can be done again. I agree with the reservations voiced by some people who say that we should not throw everything away until we have alternative sources of supply in sight and up and ready to run. We should, however, have such alternative energy resources in sight and we must invest now to bring those resources on stream. If we want something in five years’ time, we need to have started investing about four or five years previously. That is the way this works, and that is the way it will continue to work.

My request is this. We recognise now what we must do and we must plan for it. We should not obfuscate as we have tended to do in the past and come up with several reasons why we should not do things when we try to do them. I refer to being able to continue to do things in different ways. Everybody in this country has their own way of doing things. Let us take the example of the situation with national children's hospital, for example. We talked about it for 20 years. After those 20 years, we still could not come to a decision on what was the right way to go about it. We also talked about the provision of broadband for years and years, and we debated it in this House ad infinitum. When it came to reaching a conclusion, it was said that we could not have that because what was suggested was too expensive and we would have to get it done some other way.

It is not a good idea to do things on the cheap in the long term. The Ceann Comhairle and I know that well. Perhaps we have learned lessons. We may have learned how to invest in time and to do so strategically. We may also have learned to put in place the necessary measures to ensure that we do not have serious issues that we cannot handle rear up in our faces. The Ceann Comhairle can tell me how many minutes I have left.

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