Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputies for their questions. As we all appreciate, businesses are going to be affected in very different ways. Some businesses are very energy-intense; for others, labour costs outweigh energy costs many times over. Some have been able to recover their costs, often through price increases, which are unwelcome. Some businesses are very profitable and will simply face lower profits, while others are barely profitable at all and face being pushed from profit into loss. That is a very serious situation indeed. When it comes to retail, I think the big impact there is because of refrigeration and the enormous cost of running fridges.

The Minister of State, Deputy English, and I will examine the proposal by Deputies Carey and O'Dowd to extend the green transition fund to retail and the issue of accelerated capital allowances. However, we all appreciate that doing that kind of work will pay back at some point in the future, but it is not going to get businesses through the winter period. Therefore, we are working on a number of schemes we think will help businesses. One is a low-cost, low-interest loan, similar to what we had in place for Brexit and the Covid pandemic. The second is a grant scheme, in essence, which already has state aid approval from the European Commission and will be targeted at manufacturers and exporters with high energy bills. In addition to that, we need a broader measure that will help SMEs, particularly in hospitality and retail, which are facing very high costs.

It is going to be a real challenge. I have seen some extreme examples of bills going up when people have come off contracts or they are with a discount supplier. It is typical now to see bills trebling; not doubling, but trebling. That is quite typical and it is a huge increase in electricity and gas bills for businesses. I would love to be able to say the Government is going to be in a position to pay those bills or pay two thirds of those bills indefinitely, but I cannot say that and I cannot promise that. What I can say is that we will help and it will be a significant and meaningful intervention. We hope to have that in place for budget day.

I share Deputy Gannon's concerns. If our towns and cities, including Dublin city centre, are darker, they will be less safe. Of course, nobody is talking about turning down the streetlights, which will remain on as they are now, but the general streetscape is illuminated by lights in shops, businesses and public buildings. We need to be careful about that in terms of our messaging around it. While we are encouraging people to use less energy, we do not want to make our streets less safe. That is something I am very concerned about too. Luckily, most lighting, particularly LED lighting, does not use up a huge amount of electricity. It does use electricity but nothing like the electricity that is used for heating things up or cooling things down. We need to get that balance right.

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