Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The Minister is actually the Minister who opposed the reforms at European level last October. He opposed them. Sinn Féin has been raising these issues since last year. My colleagues here have been raising them with him. He has Tories on the brain. Maybe that is because he is in bed with the Irish Tories here. The fact is the Government has done the second-least amount in Europe to support households and businesses. Let us look outside of Britain. Yes, people living in Newry or Strabane will have certainty in terms of their bills, but so will people in Austria, France, Croatia, Poland and Romania. In the past 48 hours, it has been announced in the Netherlands. Denmark has announced it. The minister in Slovakia has announced that the Slovakian Government is going to bring in price certainty for customers. Why is that? It is because this is part of the European toolbox. The European Union set out that price certainty is one of the measures that countries could introduce. The Government is asleep, however. It is asleep and does not recognise the pressures that families are under. It does not recognise the pressure that all those individuals whose comments I have relayed on the floor of the Dáil are under or their concern at the sky-rocketing energy prices.

We need two things. We need to bring energy prices back to the level they were at before the crisis and then keep them there for winter. Why does the Minister oppose what Austria and France, Croatia, Poland, Romania, Denmark and the Netherlands have done and what Slovakia is going to do?

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