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

The reason we do not want to do that is because, as Deputy Bacik knows, any time you nationalise something you have to compensate the owners. Even is we were to nationalise Corrib for two, three, four or ten years, we would have to compensate the owners at a cost of many billions of euro. I would rather spend those many billions of euro helping people to reduce their bills than compensating a private company. That is the reason. What we propose to do, which makes more sense to me, is impose a windfall profit tax on fossil fuel producers. There are not many of them in Ireland. In that way, instead of spending billions of euro buying the company and compensating it and its shareholders, we can raise billions of euro that we can then use to reduce people's bills.

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