Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

There is much in the motion with which we can agree but we cannot agree with its core. The heart of it is wrong. It is incorrect. More motions such as this will be tabled and so they should. Almost one year ago People Before Profit tabled a motion on the cost-of-energy crisis that was emerging. Nothing has changed. Unfortunately motions and Bills in the Dáil do not deliver, certainly not those coming from the Opposition. Whether we agree or disagree with it, how we really get change is through getting masses of people onto the streets to send a very strong message to the Government, as has been proved in the past. I want to give a shout-out to the public to get on the street on Saturday, 24 September, to unite together to force the Government to act in a meaningful way.

The motion starts correctly by highlighting the huge hikes in the price of wholesale electricity and gas. It correctly illustrates that what is happening is that poorer households and families are affected as they spend a larger amount of their income on this area. The motion immediately moves on to conflate gas price hikes with issues around our gas supply. This is a mistake. We do not have a gas supply problem. Other countries in Europe have gas storage and they also have a gas price hike problem. The problem here is profiteering. The problem is the fact that, just like Corrib, our wind energy is privatised and we pay the market headline price. The market is profiteering. The problem is not storage and neither is it the war in Ukraine. It is deeper and it lies in the liberalisation and deregulation that happened here and in Europe in the energy sector. We think back to how the ESB made massive breakthroughs in building a global state-of-the-art energy set-up with Ardnacrusha and later with Turlough Hill and exported it throughout the world to show how hydropower could be done. If we had been relying then on the competitive tendering, deregulated and privatised model that we have in energy now we would still be in the dark in this country.

We agree with the motion that we need windfall taxes and the decoupling of gas from renewable energy and oil. Behind the energy crisis we still have the climate crisis. To deal with both, quite frankly, we have to move away from the Thatcher and Regan neo-liberalisation that thinks the market will deliver the change. This is why we are pushing for the renationalisation of the energy market.

I am glad the motion mentions data centres. As has been said, they have been much debated in the House. The real problem is that new data centres being connected to the national grid this year and next year will gobble up a huge amount of the energy we need. The surge in demand from data centres is wholly unacceptable. We cannot continue to connect new data centres to the grid.

LNG goes to the heart of why we should start by saying we do not have a gas supply problem. The Brits will not cut off Moffat tomorrow. If a lightning storm struck Moffat then we might get cut off. Where is the scaremongering coming from? I believe the hysteria is coming from the fossil fuel energy sector itself which, since the war in Ukraine, has engaged in its own war. This is a war of disinformation for profits to ensure we lock the planet and this country into new fossil fuel infrastructure for decades. It is a war against the people because of the price hikes and profiteering. We do not need LNG, private or public. What we need is to remember we are witnessing record climate catastrophe at historic levels. If these are radical ideas then God help Ireland.

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