Darren O'Rourke (Meath East, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to address this matter. The issue of electricity and energy affordability is central at this time. The motion points to the need to reform a broken market. That needs to happen, but we also need to address the cost of electricity and maximise State and community ownership of our national resources. That is not stated in the motion, but it should be.

The market is broken, and the Government has stood steadfast against reforms for far too long. Colleagues of mine here and at European level have advocated for market reform for many years. That became a very apparent necessity as far back as summer 2021. The Government, in October 2021, voted against proposals for reform. In June, the Minister of State said to my colleague, Deputy Conway-Walsh, that he did not think it was a good idea to reform the market or decouple the price of gas from that of electricity. On 11 August, the Minister for Finance said of decoupling the price of gas from that of electricity that such a windfall tax would undermine our energy independence. Essentially, it would undermine the profits of energy companies and impact on the amount they would have to reinvest. Countries that took a different approach, such as Spain and Portugal, were able to realise significant savings for electricity customers. The Government has been a barrier to that.

I welcome the U-turn, but it was a matter of a nod to the European Union and to the markets and of failing to be brave or act in the interests of the Irish people. That has happened time and again. It is the same in the context of the solidarity windfall tax and tackling the massive profits of Corrib Gas, for example. That is a Canadian company, and we talk about the Comprehensive Economic Trade Agreement. There are the massive profits of BP and Shell, €9 billion and €8 billion, respectively. The price of wind has not increased. The price of taking gas or oil out of the ground has not increased either, but the massive profits of these greedy companies have increased massively. They need to be tackled fast. My party has advocated for that for a long time.

The same goes at home in respect of the standing charge. The latter has been increased time and again, including by State-owned companies such as Electric Ireland and the ESB, without reason or explanation. The CRU tells us it does not have the legislative capacity to deal with that matter. This needs to be addressed.

Sinn Féin put forward a suite of proposals in a policy document, Vision for Renewable Energy, it launched this week. The answer for Ireland is energy independence in the form of renewables owned, as much as possible, by the State and local communities, generating jobs in the regions and stimulating local and export economies, in terms of every type of renewable and hydrogen. I will touch on a number of our proposals. We need to reform the public service obligation. That is the mechanism for funding renewables. It is a regressive levy in that it is flat and benefits large energy users because it is levied at peak demand rather than at average demand. We need to increase State investment in the forms of taxation and to incentivise and ensure communities can compete against corporations. We need a task force on the cost of renewables. Those costs are significantly lower than gas, as has been mentioned, but in Ireland those costs are greater than in other countries. That needs to be addressed. The Government has not done enough to protect people and needs to do it.

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