Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

First, I want to correct the record which Deputy Mattie McGrath failed to correct. From the get-go, People Before Profit was the most vocal opponent of the carbon tax. On the Joint Committee on Climate Action, and the Minister can be a witness to this, I had a lot of research done. I got the Society of St. Vincent de Paul and the Money Advice & Budgeting Service, MABS, in to talk about energy poverty and why it is that taxing people to the hilt will not reduce emissions. We also provided international evidence to the same effect and issued a minority report on the committee based on the need to get rid of the carbon tax. The Rural Independent Group needs to get a fact checker. It needs to do that on many levels, actually.

I will take up some of the ideological questions the Minister, Deputy Ryan, posed but I will do it in my own way. Yesterday, the debate on housing was interesting because what was absent from it was any mention of politics or ideology. That was the case until the Minister spoke as there was mostly an absence of politics or ideology from the previous Minister as well as an significant absence of any other Government speakers. What we saw yesterday was an attempt to present the housing crisis as an unfortunate set of events. On the one hand, there was this unfortunate set of events including the war, Covid and the current mess we are in and on the other hand, there was a decent man who is being unfairly blamed by the Opposition. This morning we see the same effort, in that we are in this current mess because of a series of unfortunate events and the Government countermotion really restates its position that we will keep doing business as usual, relying on the market to deliver and knowing all the time that the market is part of the problem.

Some people, including in this House, may think that our energy crisis is due to lack of investment in liquid natural gas, LNG, or because we stopped drilling and exploring for oil and gas. Some people, like a junior Minister who has taken to social media and the airwaves to champion LNG as well as live cribs, either do not believe in or care about climate change. That is fair enough if they do not. Others think that the crisis would not exist were it not for Putin’s war. There are others who want to blame it on the sun not shining or the wind not blowing.

We believe there is an energy crisis because of political decisions that were taken in this House and across the EU in the 1990s and 2000. It lies in the economic and social policy of the 1980s and 1990s in the era of Regan and Thatcher when there was a revolution, a neoliberal revolution, and its aim was the same then as it is now. When the rhetoric was stripped away, the aim was to privatise and to deregulate every industry, to boost profits for private investors and to attack unionised jobs and conditions. The political and social aim of neoliberalism is to entrench a shift in favour of private vested interests over the public good and the interests of society and, indeed, workers. It won and it succeeded and we live in a world that is dominated by that ideology. It has dominated by the political, economic and social discourse so much so that many here, including the Minister, do not believe that it exists. They see this world as a natural order, like the air we breathe, and never question it. That revolution promised people cheaper goods, more efficiency and greater wealth, but it universally failed. Instead we have fast-tracked environmental destruction, climate change and the spiralling of social and economic catastrophe more generally.

In energy we see the stark effects today with price hikes that see cases of older people suffering from hypothermia as a doctor from the Mater hospital told RTÉ radio this morning. There are record levels of energy poverty while fossil fuel companies here and across the globe record unheard of profit margins as well as an utter failure on climate. There is a boom in fossil fuel infrastructure and in new gas projects and record emissions and record levels of CO2 in the atmosphere.

This crisis is not a series of unfortunate events. It is the logical outcome of political decisions taken here and across the world to prioritise profit over people and public goods. When Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael joined in enthusiastically in this neoliberal revolution, they passed laws which changed the not-for-profit remit of the ESB, a singularly successful energy company which had done what no private or not-for-profit company could have done. It provided the cheapest, most efficient energy supply in Europe and electrified a huge chunk of rural society.

The laws passed here in the 2000s, and replicated across the EU, paved the way for the massive profiteering we are witnessing today; for the failure to invest at scale and the pace needed in renewable energy; for the climate failure; and for the price hikes that are driving more and more people into energy poverty and into hypothermia.

This motion is part of a fight against those disastrous political choices, the historic political choices that are accepted as the norm today. I am asking Sinn Féin to take a position with us and on the right side of history and to vote for this motion.

We can and must take control of energy and other areas of society back into public ownership. We can and will have a housing policy that is not based on the profits of developers and builders but on the needs that people have for shelter and for safe and decent accommodation. We can and must take back control of energy and have a supply of energy and heat that is based on the needs of people and not on the need for profits by energy generators or the fossil fuel corporations. We must take control of our national and renewable energy sources of wind, solar and tidal power and reverse the present policy of privatisation of renewable energy. That is the best guarantee of our being able to keep CO2 emissions down and to begin to really decarbonise society while at the same time provide everybody with affordable, clean energy. It would allow us to start to electrify our bus fleet and all our public buildings, and to do so in a clean way.

We may lose this motion due to the Government’s countermotion - indeed, we expect to - but this is the start not the end of a debate taking place both nationally and globally on the need to nationalise power and the energy system. It is taking place in academia and in science. In the new year, People Before Profit will launch a document around which we will continue to campaign for the need to nationalise the energy sector. We are not going to give up with one motion here that will be defeated by a majority Government which does not really look at politics and science in the way that it needs to be scrutinised. It is not good enough. We will continue to campaign for it. We will produce our document and campaign across the trade union movement and society. The Minster mentioned internationalism. We will be doing this with our brothers and sisters and other organisations and NGOs across the globe because it is the sensible thing to do and the most productive thing to do for climate and the safety and future of the people who live on this planet.

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