Gary Gannon (Dublin Central, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I acknowledge the Rural Independent Group for bringing forward this motion. We are in the midst of an unprecedented cost-of-living crisis, with inflation running at nearly 7%, the highest it has been for more than 20 years. The carbon tax is not the predominant cause of this inflationary spike. We must be clear about that, but carbon tax adds an additional cost to energy prices. The coming increase next week will add approximately €17 to annual gas bills and it will add an extra €20 to a fill of home heating oil. It will not add further costs to petrol or diesel prices. These additional costs will not be felt by everybody in society equally. There are many well-paid people in the country who will not notice these increases at all. However, those who are desperately trying to get by and who strictly account for every single cent in their weekly or monthly budgets will feel this increase and they will wonder where the money to pay it will come from.

This includes people like renters, who have already seen their rents skyrocket wildly. This morning we learned from Residential Tenancies Board, RTB, that the cost of new tenancies increased by 9% nationally in the last quarter of 2021. Based on these figures, renters in Dublin today will pay €12,000 more in rent per annum than they did in 2011. That is €12,000, which is just the annual increase. The average annual amount they will spend on rent in Dublin is nearly €24,000. For context, workers on the minimum wage – a paltry €10.50 per hour – earn just €21,840 in a year. How are workers on the minimum wage, and there are plenty of them, supposed to survive when average rental costs now exceed their annual gross pay? Rents are unsustainable, not just in Dublin but throughout the country. According to the RTB, rents in Roscommon increased by a whopping 25% in the fourth quarter of last year, rents in Waterford were up 24%, rents in Longford were up 20%, rents in Westmeath were up 18%, rents in Donegal were up 17%, and rents in Clare were up 16%. I could go on. There were double digit rental increases in 14 counties in the final quarter of last year.

It is not just renters who are being relentlessly squeezed. Families are struggling to pay childcare costs that are equivalent to their monthly mortgage or rent payments. Increases in the price of food are set to add an average of an additional €780 to bills over the next 12 months. Transport costs have risen by nearly 20% in the past year and energy prices have increased by unprecedented amounts, with some providers seeking increases of nearly 50% in recent weeks. These latest energy price increases are coming less than six months after most providers increased bills by up to 30% last year. The cost of home heating oil, in particular, has risen hugely. Home heating oil is up by nearly 130% in the past year alone. In just one month, February, prices increased by nearly 60%. This is not sustainable.

There is a regional dimension to this. The impact of this inflationary spiral in energy costs is uneven across the country. According to the Central Statistics Office, CSO, in the Border region, 66% of households use home heating oil, and in the west of the country, 58% of households use home heating oil. However, just 8% of homes in Dublin use home heating oil because most people are connected to gas networks. This must be acknowledged by the Government and to date it has not been. Prices throughout the country are soaring and it is the job of the Government to mitigate those price increases for those who can least afford to bear them, those on low and middle incomes.

Those on low pay spend a disproportionate amount of their incomes on necessities like food and fuel costs and they must be insulated from price increases they cannot sustain. To date, regrettably, the Government has not done this. It has been slow to act, and when it finally did, the measures it adopted were insufficient and not adequately targeted. It failed to broaden the eligibility for the fuel allowance. This means, for instance, families in receipt of the working family payment have no entitlement to the payment, nor do carers. It failed to increase core social welfare rates despite the fact core rates have increased by just a miserly €5 in three years. People on fixed incomes, like elderly people on pensions, are particularly vulnerable to price shocks, and it bears repeating that the Government has seen fit to increase their core payment by just €5 in three years. Workers on low and middle incomes are also struggling to get by as prices rocket. The Government could have put €300 back into the pockets of individual workers earning less than €50,000 using a refundable tax credit. This was suggested by the Social Democrats but the Government refused to listen. It preferred to give households a €200 universal electricity credit, which many people still have not received, by the way, so that millionaires got the same benefit as those on low incomes.

The Minister, Deputy Ryan, or whoever is stepping in for him, will likely tell us all about the retrofitting programme and what a difference that will make. The reality of that programme is delays of two years and more for the warmer homes scheme. That is the initiative that is supposed to be targeted at those who need it most, low-income households at risk of fuel poverty. How can the Minister continue to crow about the programme's success when it is failing those who need it most? He and the Government need to get real.

The Social Democrats are aware we are facing a climate emergency that not only threatens our lives but the sustainability of life on this planet. We have just eight years to halve our emissions, but under this Government, emissions are going up, not decreasing. That is not my opinion; it is according to the head of the Environmental Protection Agency. The Government must take radical action to reduce emissions. What is happening instead? Three huge data centres on the east coast and midlands have received planning permission in recent days alone. Meanwhile, the Government failed to support a Social Democrats motion calling for a moratorium on new data centres last year. It cannot continue to talk out of both sides of its mouth on climate change.

The Social Democrats believe, given the impending climate catastrophe, that the carbon tax is necessary but the money raised must be ring-fenced and used for those who can least withstand soaring energy prices. The Government has yet to publish a detailed breakdown of how the carbon tax collected every year is spent and where the money is going. It must do that as a matter of urgency in the interests of transparency. It cannot simply impose a carbon tax and use its existence as evidence that it is taking the climate emergency seriously. That is not fooling anyone. All of the Government’s policies, in every Department, need to be climate-proofed and that is not happening. The evidence is our consistent failure to meet our climate targets.

Time is running out for us, for our children, for our grandchildren and for the planet. Enough of the sermonising and the platitudes from the Government benches, please. Reaching our climate targets will not be easy and no politician should claim it will be. There will have to be widespread changes in the way all of us live and that will not be easy, but it is the job of the Government to ensure that, as we make this transition, the most vulnerable in our society are protected to the greatest extent possible. It is failing at that job and that is being felt in the homes of people throughout the country, be it in rural or city environments. That failure cannot continue.

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