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

I thank Sinn Féin for the motion. I think all of us have put similar motions before the House, and while sometimes you might feel you are banging your head off a brick wall, it is important we revisit this issue and keep revisiting it again and again. We should do so mostly because the Government is failing the population on this. Businesses get the supports and then they get the reduced bills from the energy companies. There are market explanations for that. They are very convoluted. You would want to have a degree in economics to begin to understand them or impart what is in them. However, that does not make it logical, sensible or acceptable that market rules can drive up the cost to ordinary consumers to an immoral level while at the same time talking about how the prices will come down. I had a briefing from Electric Ireland in the recent past and it is very doubtful the curve that is now dancing around the energy price graph is going to come down at all. I was told it is most likely to dance, that is, to go up and down repeatedly.

I note the Government mostly blames energy prices and the housing crisis on Putin's war. I have no doubt the invasion of Ukraine has made a major impact, but that does not really explain it.

It does not explain why we could produce electricity in the 1930s and 1940s and deliver it all over the country at a low price to citizens and also build tens of thousands of houses across the State, at scale, and provide people with proper, well-built and well-designed public housing, but we cannot do so now in the 21st century. This country is the third richest on the planet per head of population according to the World Bank. The people we, as elected representatives, deal with are not the third wealthiest individuals in the world. They are among the poorest and most hard done by in Europe because they are struggling to cope with the cost-of-living crisis.

We must also keep an eye on food inflation. It is running at 16% in the past three months. I raised this issue last week in the context of the Department of Social Protection because food inflation is now having a major impact on the delivery of school meals. The companies who deliver those meals are struggling to do so on the basis of the amount the State gives them per child. We have major challenges ahead of us. The one we are addressing tonight, however, is that of high energy costs. As people's winter gas and electricity bills have arrived in recent weeks, it has become clear that the previous one-off payments and the proposed measures will barely scratch the surface for all these people. Allied to the panic they feel about the lifting of the eviction ban today, there is now terror on their faces because of the bills they are facing for gas and electricity.

I am struck by the fact that these two things are linked. The root causes in this regard are the free market, the deregulation, in the context of this debate in particular, of the energy system and the profiteering of major corporations. Between September 2021 and 2022, the price of food items rose by 18.7% on average. The prices of some items, including dairy products have risen by as much as 49%. In the context of energy, the annual profits of the five largest integrated private sector oil and gas companies, Chevron Corporation, ExxonMobil, Shell, BP and TotalEnergies, soared to $195 billion in 2022. This is nearly 120% more than in the previous year. Those profits now stand at the highest level in the industry's history, and this industry has some history. In the first six months of 2022, the ESB's profits more than trebled to €390.3 million. Operating profits at Bord Gáis Energy increased by 74% in the first six months of 2022. Corrib gas profits trebled in the same time, to €560 million.

I heard the Taoiseach make an extraordinary statement in this Chamber last week. It was not about ending the eviction ban, and that this was in the public interest, and nor was it that free public transport is not a good idea. It was the even more extraordinary claim that the ESB never had a not-for-profit mandate. He also stated that, unlike others, he is not ideological. Perhaps he missed out on the 1980s, the 1990s and the early 2000s, the era of Reagan, Thatcher and neoliberalism. I refer to the neoliberalism that privatised everything the State ran efficiently, and, particularly in this case, the energy system. The results include the rip-off pay-as-you-go companies we see today and the district heating systems that charge commercial rates to a large number of residents, including some living in public housing. We did see the remit of the ESB change in the early 2000s, from one of being not-for-profit to the present commercial position in a newly created competitive market. It removed the aim of providing the cheapest, most efficient and much-praised market that the ESB delivered before it was deregulated. People here paid the lowest amount, before that deregulation, in the whole of Europe for their consumption of energy. The change in this regard was completely justified on the basis of the usual capitalist crap, which holds that if there is competition, then there will be lower prices, more efficiency and better choices. We have that competition now and the prices have been driven up to an astronomical level. People do not get much choice, because even though they can change from one electricity company to another, they are not seeing the benefit of doing so anymore.

Sinéad Mercier, an academic, pointed out last year that the ESB was forced to artificially increase its prices to attract competitors into the new energy market the State spent millions on creating. When the ESB's statutory requirement to operate on a not-for-profit and break-even basis was repealed in 2001, electricity prices skyrocketed and energy poverty increased, leading to an annual excess of 2,800 cold-related deaths and a sharp spike in the number of disconnections. If this was not ideological and if the outcome of this change was not very political, then I do not know what is. I say this because it was driven by prioritising the needs of profit over the needs of people. The Taoiseach might not accept this, but windfall profits, energy poverty and the current crazy market system will ensure high gas and other energy prices for ordinary people regardless of the wholesale markets. All these things are the results of the privatisation and liberalisation of the energy market.

Today, we have the bitter fruits of those so-called reforms. These include massive profiteering, as I have just pointed out, in food and energy and a reluctance, if not hostility, from this Government and others, to retake control over vital systems and to reverse privatisation and liberalisation. We do want windfall taxes on profits and once-off payments to help the poor to be able to pay their bills, but this will not deal with the root causes of the crisis. We must retake control of the energy system. This is called renationalisation. It means restoring the not-for-profit mandate of the ESB. All the customers would then flock to the ESB because it would be able to charge lower prices. We could then take control of the renewable energy sector, which we must build up quickly and on a grand scale in order to deal with the climate and energy crises. Reversing neoliberal policies as a response to the energy and climate crises is what we must do. The marketisation of energy makes meaningful climate action and price control impossible. If we do not do as I suggest, matters will only get worse.

People Before Profit will be launching a document on this subject in the coming weeks. It will be concerned with how we can renationalise the energy sector. Equally, as part of the Cost of Living Coalition, which also includes the Social Democrats and Sinn Fein, along with trade unions, students' unions and housing bodies, we will be organising a major demonstration on 1 April against this Government's high cost-of-living charges. April Fools' Day is the day on which we wish to ask the Government who it is fooling and why it is not doing something to control the cost of living for ordinary people. Against this background, are the vast profits we have just heard about. It is shameful, immoral and outrageous that something is not being done to service the population of this country.

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