Michael McNamara (Clare, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I very much welcome this motion from the Rural Independent Group. I will support the motion if I am not called upon to pair with a committee Chair who has to be elsewhere. It is a very important motion in that it recognises, as most people recognise, that we would like to move to renewables. We also have to realistic about the fact that we will not achieve that in a couple of days, weeks or even months. We will have to be realistic. We will have to figure out a strategy for powering this State while we make that move.

I have listened to what the Government has to say about this matter and in particular to the Minister, Deputy Eamon Ryan, who is the Minister in the Department tasked with this. There is great hope for the offshore wind energy sector and he has considerable ambitions in that regard. I would never fault anybody for having hope or ambition but they have to be tempered a little bit by reality. Notwithstanding all the talk that we will be net exporters of wind energy, we have to bear in mind that in 2020, when this Government came to power, 35% of the energy generated in the State was generated by wind. Last year, that fell to 29%. The reality belies the words that are being floated about.

We are told that offshore wind is this great panacea, but I would like to refer to Equinor, the Norwegian state company formally known as Statoil, is almost the biggest player and is certainly at the cutting edge of floating turbines. They are the only ones I am aware of who have developed floating turbines. To harness the wind energy off the Atlantic, the turbines will have to be floating, because offshore turbines need to be either anchored or floating. They will be anchored in the Irish Sea but will have to be floating in the Atlantic. However, Equinor has pulled out. There had been a huge announcement, and I was delighted with what was going to happen at Moneypoint, but the company pulled out a couple of months later. The company did not cite anything, but industry sources said it was because the company was baffled by the lack of planning and regulatory reform and the lack of any real capability or possibility of developing this sector in Ireland.

We are being told, "live, horse, and you will get grass" - the grass we are going to get is this offshore wind energy - but we do not even have the ports. A national ports study by Wind Energy Ireland which was released today found that we have no ports in the Republic of Ireland. I am aware that the CEO of Foynes Port is very ambitious in this regard, but his ambition has to be backed by Government ambition and it has to be funded. Again, the moves are not in that direction. It is great that we have an ambitious CEO in Foynes Port with the foresight to see what needs to be done, but it is not so good if this ambition is not matched by the Government. The ambition needs to be matched throughout the country.

If offshore wind is to be the great panacea which the Government says it will be, we will need to have suitable ports to load these substantial developments. These floating turbines will be absolutely mammoth in scale. They have be done locally. If the big companies could load up the ships in Aberdeen or Stranraer they would do so, but they cannot. The turbines have to be done locally, but we do not have the ports to do this. Not alone do we not have the ports, but there is no sign of us having the ports to do it. At the same time, we are being told we will have lots of wind energy which will solve all of our problems.

I support the Government's ambition and hope, but I speak to small businesses throughout this State that are being hammered. I will give an example.

The Shannon Swimming and Leisure Centre is State-funded. The centre's energy bills doubled from August 2020 to August 2021 and doubled again to August 2022. They are more than €7,000 per month. The centre is funded through the Clare County Council. How is it going to keep its doors open? How is it going to provide a facility to schoolchildren and people in Shannon who want to swim and stay fit? How is that going to happen? That is just one example. Then there are the supermarkets. When I was a child there was only one fridge in many shops and now there are walls of fridges and whatever. They are not going to be able to keep the lights on because we are utterly reliant on imported energy and nothing the Government is doing is changing that fact.

We have no control over the cost of imported energy. We have to pay whatever the rate is and we are not developing. We are talking about wind energy but we are not really developing it. We are not even talking about nuclear energy but we are happy to import it and pay whatever the going rate is. Of course, the going rate is linked to the price of gas, which suits the Germans. It is "All hail the Germans" in the Government at the moment, especially Ursula von der Leyen. Has the Taoiseach told the Minister of State what job he is getting? Our strategy on gas, the Ukraine war and everything is based on whatever the European Commission wants, so somebody is clearly auditioning for a role. Maybe it is the Minister of State himself; I do not know. However, I am not content to see this State being sold down the swanny on the basis of the Germans' mistake of putting all their eggs in one basket. The Minister of State can heave and sigh and fall over if he wants to, but the reality is Germany is utterly dependent on gas because it decommissioned its nuclear plants. France is in a much better place because it did not decommission its plants, given it costs an awful lot less to produce nuclear energy at the moment than it does to generate electricity through gas. The Germans made a mistake and the French did not. As Germans made a mistake, we are all paying for it because the price we pay for imported energy, be it generated by nuclear or any other method, is linked to the price of gas and that is at the behest of the Germans, and we, for whatever reason, are in thrall to Ursula von der Leyen. She is of course a former Minister of Defence in Germany. They wanted to get rid of her and managed to shunt her off all right but that is a different matter.

I come back to energy. I am asking that this Government get real about how we are going to keep the lights on in the State and how we are going to achieve some degree of self-sufficiency. I commend the Rural Independent Group on bringing forward a motion in that regard. I am very disappointed by the countermotion put forward by the Government, which is basically whistling past the graveyard. Live horse and you will get grass. It will all be fine on the day. It will not, unless strategy changes. I see no sign of the Government's lofty words being matched with actions on the ground.

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