Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I just want to give the House a laugh, albeit a grim laugh, by reading from The Irish Timesfrom 2011. Mr. Conor Pope wrote an article at that time when it was announced that the Government was going to deregulate the electricity market. It is a real exercise in the ideological blindness and stupidity of people who believe in the efficiency of markets. In all seriousness, the ESB, the Consumers Association of Ireland, CAI, and others all welcomed the deregulation of the electricity market. They said it was going to be a "win-win" for consumers and for the company because with the deregulation of the market, there was going to be aggressive competition on price. Mr. Dermott Jewell of the CAI is quoted as saying, "We have waited a long time for this to happen, and for much of that time the ESB was saying that if the regulator removed its shackles it would be able to aggressively compete on price.” Mr. Jewell went on to say that the company was being given the chance to "get into the game" and that it would create a "win-win situation for the suppliers and consumers and should drive down prices".

This is textbook market dogma, which holds that when competition is introduced and markets are deregulated, prices go down. Of course, that is the rubbish they teach in economics textbooks and in many of the universities. Here, it was dictating policy on what was probably the most successful State enterprise the State had ever built. This was done at a time we had among the lowest electricity prices anywhere in Europe. What happened? Did prices go down? Was it a win-win for the consumer? No, the exact opposite happened. Prices went up immediately. In fact, they were forced to go up because low prices would be a distortion of the market. If we subsidise prices to keep them low, that is a distortion of market principles. All the other private providers that wanted to make profits and that were not operating as the ESB had been previously on a not-for-profit basis, were screaming from the rooftops that it was not fair, that they could not get their share of the market because the ESB might give lower or subsidised prices - affordable prices, in other words - for ordinary people. The ESB, therefore, had to immediately hike its prices and they have been on an upward trajectory ever since. We have gone from having some of the lowest electricity prices to having some of the highest. The biggest price hikes have been in this country and are way in excess of what is happening in most of the rest of Europe. That is the truth about what is going on. People will say that it is about Ukraine but this has been happening since the deregulation of the energy market.

People talk about the war in Ukraine and Russia's brutal invasion as having contributed to this crisis but they should step back a little and ask where Mr. Putin came from. He came from the privatisation of state enterprises. A raft of oligarchs were created by privatisation. All of the rottenness of the Putin regime is, to a very substantial degree, a result of the privatisation of their state enterprises as well and the creation of a new layer of greedy billionaire oligarchs who are also profiteering off the current crisis. Ironically, the sanctions that we have imposed on Russia have increased their profitability. The increases in energy prices means that the Russian energy oligarchs are also making a fortune. It is a win-win for the oligarchs and the privatised energy companies in this country and across Europe but it is lose-lose for ordinary people who are being crippled with unaffordable and, in some cases, unpayable bills. I have had people come into my office who have not had hot water for a year because they just cannot afford it. These are elderly people, some of whom are not well, and they have no hot water. I have had people in my office who are on district heating systems and who are being charged

multiples of the already massively-hiked kilowatt hour charges that everybody else has seen with ESB and others. The increases by Kaizen Energy and Veolia are multiples of the increases of other companies, not to mention the other charges referred to in the motion.

I forgot to thank Sinn Féin for the motion. We are absolutely happy to agree with the call for a windfall tax. We have been calling for such a tax ourselves for at least two years. We also agree that the CRU should be given teeth to look at price gouging and all the rest of it. However, we believe at this stage that we have to go further in the context of the point I am making. The current situation can be traced back to the deregulation and privatisation of these companies. That has allowed the ESB, for example, to increase its profits from €679 million in 2021 to €847 million in 2022. Centrica, the company that owns Bord Gáis, saw its profits last year almost triple from €1.2 billion to €3.3 billion.

That is a familiar picture all across Europe, including in Russia. Their energy companies are making a fortune. The fossil fuel companies and other energy companies throughout Europe are making a fortune. Ireland is absolutely no exception. In fact, it is worse than many other places. That is the truth about the cost-of-living crisis. It is not just in the energy sector. What is happening to mortgage holders at the moment is that the banks are seeing shocking increases in their profits. AIB’s profits were up massively last year. They have given out nearly €300 million in dividends to their shareholders while ordinary mortgage holders are hammered. If someone is an investor in the energy companies or the banks or the real estate investment trusts, REITs, he or she is making a fortune. However, for the tenant, the mortgage holder or the energy customer it is a very different picture. That is the truth of the cost-of-living crisis.

To our mind, it means we need to learn the lesson of where all this began with deregulation and privatisation. We need to take these companies back into public ownership and operate them on a not-for-profit basis. That needs to happen with the energy companies. The ESB is in public ownership but it needs to go back to operating on a not-for-profit basis and give subsidised prices to ordinary people in order that they are not driven into energy poverty. That will drive out the other private, profit-gouging companies that are profiteering off other people’s misery. Similarly we need to retain and re-establish full public control of the banks such as the AIB and the Permanent TSB so that we can actually control mortgage interest rates, stop ripping customers off and ensure that people are not being impoverished by massive hikes, unaffordable in many cases, in their mortgage interest repayments. In a similar way, in the housing sector, we need to re-establish public control over the housing sector and take it out of the hands of the vulture funds, wealth asset management companies and the profiteering developers and speculators.

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