Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

The Government approved windfall taxes and will introduce them. The Deputy will say that the way we do it means we are the weakest in Europe in that regard, but the exact opposite is the truth. Similarly in terms of market reform, it would be easy to say we should just apply a cap. Some of those windfall measures effectively apply a cap, but other caps would come with large potential costs to the Irish people and would not have the same targeted capability that we introduced by using measures in the social welfare system. I fundamentally believe that the Sinn Féin approach would have been the wrong one to protect the people of this country. What the Government did was more targeted, more timely and more effective, and it is not over. We are not through this crisis yet and we do not know which way the war will go. While gas prices have come down from their incredible highs of less than a year ago, they are still two and a half times the historical average over the previous five years. We have to continue learning by doing and by assessing where we need to go next. Included in that is reform of the European energy markets. For anyone to say that that would be simple and all we had to do was whatever with the market system-----

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