Seán Canney (Galway East, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to speak on the motion which is timely and I thank the Rural Independent Group for tabling it. It follows the Regional Group's motion last week which was unopposed by the Government. It set out a template for how to deal with the energy crisis and the energy price crisis that we have. There is much rhetoric and talk about these issues. We have to speak about real action. Last week I said to the Minister, Deputy Eamon Ryan, that we produced a document and set of proposals that could be a template for doing something practical and logical. I am sure the Minister of State hears in his office, as does every Minister, about the number of small businesses in the country that are on the edge and paying through the roof for their energy. There are small shops in small towns and villages. Small publicans are fighting against the tide in any event following Covid. The price of electricity for them to run their coolers and make sure everything is right for the food they sell has increased threefold. It is not alarming but scary.

Last Saturday morning a man spoke to me on the street in Tuam. He said that if there is not something in the budget for business people, he will close. He is young with a fairly sizeable business. He owns his own property. He does not have a mortgage on it and he is not renting it. He has been there for the past 20 years. He says he will close the doors unless he sees something happening. This is what we are looking at. This is with regard to the cost of energy. We also have energy security.

I will repeat what we said last week, which is that there is one simple solution. People can say it is not simple because of legal matters. The Derrybrien wind farm in my constituency could serve 40,000 houses with green energy.

We should bring something in here to the Dáil that we could all agree upon to get that opened as a matter of urgency. It would be a statement of intent to get more energy, and more green energy. There is no controversy about that. It is an immediate step that can be taken to help people living in fear of not having energy next winter or having blackouts. Industry cannot afford to have blackouts or downtime in its energy supply, never mind the fact that it is paying so much more for it.

We should be looking at how we can generate more green energy as simply as possible. If one looks at all the farm buildings around this country, it is a matter of getting supports to them to use the microgeneration that is there. The microgeneration scheme that has been in place has sold a pup to many homeowners because they were supposed to get a payback from the grid when they were pumping energy into it. This should have been happening since July of last year but they still have not got that sorted out which is an indictment of the way the policies are being enacted. We need better and stronger plans.

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