Danny Healy-Rae (Kerry, Independent) | Oireachtas source

The purpose of this Bill is to make amendments to the Credit Guarantee Act 2012 to support the needs of businesses to access additional finance. According to the Government, the intention is to respond to the economic difficulties resulting from the aggression against Ukraine by Russia by creating a specific Ukraine credit guarantee scheme. However, the problem with rising energy prices started long before the war in Ukraine, which started around 26 February.

The skyrocketing Irish energy prices are largely caused by three factors. The ongoing dysfunctional energy policy position places an effective ban on new domestic energy sources that are not renewable. If we are to talk about the dismantling of the Shannonbridge and Lanesborough power stations, every day since they were closed the cost of electricity has gone up. I welcome credit being made more easily available to businesses across the board. However, we do not want businesses to go into debt. The cause of many of them being in trouble is the cost of electricity, petrol and diesel. When we talk about the cost of living going up, it is basically all due to the cost of energy. There are so many things we could be self-sufficient in. I do not agree with all this climate change because the records tell us that climate change happened back over the years.

I do not agree that what we are doing is the cause of it, including the people cutting enough turf to keep themselves warm for the winter. I am proud of the people who go out and cut their own turf and are keeping themselves warm when the rain and bad weather come. I am proud of those people and they are proud of themselves for being self-sufficient. We know members of the Government are not happy about it. Do they want those people to be cold? The cost of heating oil today is €1.40 or €1.50 a litre. It costs an enormous amount at this time to fill a tank. People are putting only €300 or €400 worth of oil in to keep themselves going for a couple of weeks.

This country survived during the Second World War because of turf. The Government seems to be blaming the current war for everything. Surely we should be doing things to help ourselves to be as self-sufficient as we can be, not pandering to Russia by buying its coal and being dependent on it for gas. We should be storing gas in the old Kinsale Head gas field. We could have bought enough gas during the summer, when it was much cheaper, and stored it there for use. We could be developing the oil field off Barryroe, from which we could derive gas, petrol and oil distillates. Likewise, deposits of gas were found off the Kerry coast but, in 2019, the then Taoiseach, who is now the Tánaiste, took away the licences from the prospective operators who were going to drill there. We could now be exporting gas to other parts of the world if we sourced our own gas. Instead, the Government has cut off its nose to spite its face. It does not understand the harm it is doing to the poor honest people who are trying to live, keep a roof over their heads and travel to work faced with the high cost of petrol and diesel.

The cost of electricity is another problem. The Government is saying it will introduce a windfall tax and give it back to the people. Why is it allowing the electricity companies to charge so much that they are tripling their profits? Is it because the Government is getting triple the amount of taxes out of them? Where is the energy regulator? Where is the Minister who is in charge of this? The people in Kerry I represent, like people in the areas other Deputies represent, are totally disenchanted by this type of policy. Why are the energy companies not being curtailed at this time?

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