Denis Naughten (Roscommon-Galway, Independent) | Oireachtas source

Budget 2023 reminds me of the kitchen sink. What the Government has done is to put an overflow pipe onto the sink, but the difficulty is that is not turning off the tap and if that the water comes in any quicker it will still overflow. That is the difficulty with this budget. While it is helping and while the investment that is being put in is welcome, it will not deal with any of the systemic challenges, particularly in relation to the cost of energy and the cost of electricity.

We see that the retrofitting targets are falling dramatically short of what were set out in Project Ireland 2040. Retrofitting is a measure that can reduce the electricity costs permanently for people. Project Ireland 2040 contains a commitment to retrofit 45,000 homes per annum from 2021. The target for next year is just 37,000 homes.

There is nothing in this legislation or in this budget to address the issue of standing charges for electricity. Electricity standing charges on families today are between €500 and €700 per year. Of course, we passed the legislation in this House last July to increase the cost of those standing charges by another €120. Disappointingly, the Government, rather than making an announcement on a windfall energy tax, is awaiting the taking of measures at European Union level instead of applying the renewable electricity support scheme clawback - something that I was involved in developing that as Minister - into the renewable energy wind and solar farms that are making excessive profits under the existing old renewable energy feed-in tariff. By using the new clawback model that has been developed, approved and adopted by the renewable energy companies in this country, we could hand money back to electricity customers across this country.

The budget involves a substantial figure of €11 billion that will be handed out to people. It was only possible to put the budget together because of corporation tax. The Department of Finance estimates that between €8 billion and €10 billion of corporation tax taken in this year is vulnerable to shock. In fact, the Minister for Finance pointed out that ten multinational companies account for over one third of the total tax take by Revenue. Without that money coming in, there would have been a significant deficit this year of €8 billion instead of a headline surplus of €1 billion.

We need not just to acknowledge that, which the Minister did yesterday, but to put a replacement in place. The only effective way to do that is to have a sovereign wealth fund that is actually built on our own natural resources. Anywhere across the globe where there is a sovereign wealth fund, it is built on the natural resources of the country involved.

We have a 220-million acre maritime resource off our coast, where we have the potential to develop 70,000 MW of offshore renewable electricity. We need to think outside the box and implement ambitious solutions to clean up our energy supply, to provide sustainable long-term employment opportunities and ensure that Ireland becomes a global renewable energy exporter. To do that, we need a radical overhaul of Ireland's industrial development policy to achieve our climate goals and grasp the opportunity that we have off our coast.

At the weekend, there was a headline in the papers which read "EU downgrades Ireland's north and west to a 'lagging region'". That is because of the lack of industrial development along our west and north-west. We cannot overcome that challenge we have in our region in a piecemeal or a haphazard manner. In the same paper, there were reports that Shell is withdrawing its offshore development plans for 1.35 GW of electricity off our coast, which follows the previous withdrawal of Equinor, which was planning to develop 1.4 GW of electricity off our coast. Between them, those two investors alone were going to generate enough electricity to power 2.24 million homes across this country. We can never develop that resource or create the types of employment and opportunities that we could have, in the west and the north west, providing the balanced regional development, unless we develop a strategy which is in the long-term interests of this country, and not just allowing these projects to be developer-led. As I have said, there is 70 GW of potential electricity generation off our coast. That is not only enough to meet our own long-term needs, but also the long-term needs of France and Austria together. What we need to do is to ensure that we establish an offshore renewable development authority, similar to IDA Ireland, that would drive a fully co-ordinated national action plan. It would have responsibilities ranging from research and development to supply chain development to the commercial deployment of renewable energy, and would ensure that Ireland becomes the global leader in the export of sustainable clean energy.

In order to do that, we also need to have an export channel. The best possible export channel for that is to develop an Atlantic electricity interconnector from the west coast of Ireland directly into the European grid. However, we can only do that if we take a strategic approach and if that strategic approach is taken now. There is no point in kicking the can down the road and hoping that something will happen in the future, and that investors from outside will come in and drive the type of innovative change that is needed. We can only do that by driving that change ourselves, by setting up an agency and authority to drive that and to ensure that Irish citizens and the Irish State benefit in the long term.

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