Matt Shanahan (Waterford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

On behalf of the Regional Group, I thank our parliamentary assistant, Cáit Nic Amhlaoibh, for the work she has done on this motion.

We are in an energy security difficulty and an energy cost crisis. I want to read into the record commentary from the Irish Petrol Retailers Association. A station owner, Johnny Brady of Coolquay, recently received an electricity bill of €23,000 for August. He says that paying these bills is unsustainable. His electricity cost for the overnight rate has increased from 7 cent per kilowatt hour to 37 cent per kilowatt hour. He says he has nothing against data centres but wind turbines run overnight when the country's usage is at a minimum. He asks are the data centres also paying 37 cent per kilowatt hour for this overnight usage. Mr. Brady calls for the Commission for Regulation of Utilities to investigate urgently and let the country know that businesses and families are not being penalised unfairly for overnight usage. He also presented significant detail regarding the rates which are coming back from local authorities.

There are significant difficulties facing our business community domestically, of which I know the Minister of State, Deputy Smyth, is aware. I question the policy of the Government and whether it is reactive or proactive. I am thinking specifically in terms of green policy. I referenced in the debate last night the forestry sector. We know the green credentials around forestry and that we may want to increase forestry and carbon sequestration. However, at the moment, if we look at where forestry licences are going, 80% of them are for felling, not for planting, and most of that is going towards the public sector, not the private sector growers. That is just one significant disconnect. In the motion, we have called for the reopening of the Lanesborough and Shannonbridge power stations, to be fuelled by biomass, but that can only be achieved if we seriously look at the legislation we have for thinning forestry. It is not happening simply because of the amount of bureaucracy around this.

There was an article in theIrish Examinertoday showing that the Government did not make any application to the EU’s new REPowerEU programme, a €35 billion programme to try to ensure energy security, despite the fact there was a significant component that Ireland could apply for under biomethane and anaerobic digestion and, in fact, €800 million would probably have been our share. It is obvious that the Green Party did not support the Government looking for this because it is a supporter of anaerobic digesters. I believe this is a significant deficit in the country. The Minister of State, Deputy Smyth, can tell me I am wrong and I am sure he will do so, but we did not make the application and we left €800 million lying around, or that is what it looks like.

Solar PV is mentioned in our motion. Why can we not disregard planning permission for new solar PV? New barrier membranes are being developed in the Far East that will cover roofs; these are not solar panels but barrier membranes that can generate solar power. Surely this is something we should become active on. We gave a commitment to the agricultural sector over two years ago that we were going to provide significant grant-aid to farmers for deploying solar power but, again, we have no way of getting back to the grid for most farmers so they can only use it for their own purposes. This is no good when they have spare power that they could certainly put back into the grid.

We need to speak about the supports to households and to businesses. The Taoiseach has signalled that some of these supports will not be ready by the time the budget is approved in less than two weeks and that we have to wait and see what the EU is going to come up with. Can we not be more proactive in terms of trying to provide supports? We must give a signal to our domestic economy and to our SMEs as to how we are going to support them, given what is coming down the road. Otherwise, people will lose confidence exponentially. People are looking at their business models. I met people from a very large publican business in Waterford before the weekend who told me they are considering closing at the end of September or in October because their business is not sustainable. They think the best thing they can do is stay closed until February or March, with the loss of nearly 25 whole-time jobs.

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