Brian Leddin (Limerick City, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I am happy to have ceded some of my time to my colleague, Deputy Durkan. The €100 which is going to every electricity customer in the State is welcome. Similar schemes have been introduced in other EU countries. I am the Chair of the Joint Committee on Environment and Climate Action. Last week, the committee waived the requirement for pre-legislative scrutiny of this Bill, which is going to bring relief to struggling householders. We were guided in our decision by officials of the Department. I thank them for coming into us, briefing us and helping us with that decision. I also thank the members of the committee who took that decision in the interests of the people of Ireland who are struggling to pay their energy bills.

Listening to the debate, I heard few speakers refer to the reasons we have an energy crisis and why we are in a situation where we are making this €100 payment to electricity customers across the State. The energy crisis that we are experiencing is inexplicably linked with the security crisis looming on the other side of the Continent on the Ukraine border. Approximately 88% of all our energy is imported, and, for geopolitical reasons over which we have no control, the price of the energy that we use in Ireland has risen extraordinarily. As a result, as much as for sound climate reasons, we must wean ourselves off imported energy and especially energy imported from regions of the world which are politically unstable or, indeed, hostile to us. True energy independence and security of supply will come from developing our own indigenous energy resources. These resources are clean and renewable. We have more energy resources within the confines of our borders than we will ever be likely to need, yet we have barely started to harness them.

The events on the Ukraine border, as much as the climate crisis, compel us in Ireland to expedite our efforts. I argued a few weeks ago that it is in Europe's interest that Ireland should build up its deep water port capacity as fast as possible to stage arrays of thousands of large wind turbines off the Atlantic coast, and that our interconnection capacity should be ramped up so that we, not the Russians, can send vast amounts of clean power, not fossil fuel power, to Europe when it needs it. It would be clean power from the west to Europe, rather than dirty, carbon-intensive power from the east.

My colleague, Deputy Higgins, was correct earlier when she outlined the scale of the opportunity and said that we must accelerate it. Unlike other Deputies across the House who spoke in this debate, I believe we can realise this opportunity quickly. We have no need to rely on building new fossil fuel infrastructure or nuclear energy. Whether it is LNG infrastructure or nuclear energy, those projects will take ten or 15 years to develop. We do not have that time. We can build up our renewable resources in that timeframe.

I agree with Deputy Paul Murphy, which is probably a first for me in this House. He made the crucial point quite clearly that demand management should be a critical area of energy policy. We certainly will not agree on most issues, but if we do not invest heavily in demand management, we will essentially waste energy, be it fossil fuel or renewable. I am delighted that the national retrofit plan will be launched next Tuesday and that it will contain a series of measures to address the demand management angle.

See this speech in context