Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to contribute on this motion. I thank Sinn Féin for setting out crystal clearly the unsustainability of energy bills, which continue to rise, and the Government's failure to deal adequately with the issue. I welcome that approximately €12 billion has been paid out over the past year under a number of schemes, but they were all one-off, piecemeal schemes with no overall policy setting out where we were going. We have faced crisis after crisis. We started when we declared a climate emergency and a biodiversity emergency. The housing crisis existed before I entered the Dáil and has continued unabated. There is also the crisis with the war in Ukraine. However, at no stage has the Government shown we need transformative action. I welcome the money it has provided, but that should have formed part of transformative action, and the Government has failed utterly to do that.

We will support Sinn Féin in what is once again a piecemeal approach. This is the position into which we have been forced. The EU regulation dates from almost five months ago, yet we still have not seen the promised legislation on capping and taxing windfall profits. There is no sense of urgency whatsoever. The Government cites Europe constantly in terms of supporting Europe and waiting for a policy. Regarding the war in Ukraine, for example, we do not want to use our voice for neutrality, as it is important that we stand with Europe, yet various European countries are all taking initiatives in respect of taxing windfall profits and so forth. We do not seem to have any difficulty with that. Certainly, the Government does not.

I have never supported a carbon tax. I am on record as describing the climate emergency and the biodiversity emergency as existential threats and I will do anything to make this country greener, but I do not believe carbon tax is the way to do it. It is an unjust tax. If Sinn Féin is changing its mind in that regard, I welcome that change. I also welcome that its motion calls for the increase to be reduced.

Before discussing the carbon tax, I will raise another point. We are still waiting for the report on the review of security of energy supply. It was promised in 2020 and we are now in 2023. Cambridge Economic Policy Associates, CEPA, was appointed as the technical consultant. Again, there is no sense of urgency.

We on the left have been accused of being completely out of touch because we are against a carbon tax. I come from Galway city and saw what a positive policy did there almost 23 years ago. We had three bins. We had an education liaison officer, who went out to homes to discuss recycling and reuse. A book was written on the policy, entitled The Burning Issue. Does the Minister of State know what the Government of the time did? This will be of interest to him. It took power away from local authorities to develop their own waste management plans. Does the Minister of State remember any of this? Galway City Council was showing the way forward, yet it was the second-last local authority whose services in this respect were privatised. That was an absolute disaster. I know the power of encouraging people. Indeed, it was the people that led Galway City Council.

The carbon tax was introduced in 2010. I note what Professor John Sweeney said. He is in favour of the carbon tax, but he stated that politicians felt comfortable discussing taxes rather than more fundamental social and economic changes. I would use slightly different language and say "transformative changes", where we bring energy to the new changes we have to make and they are owned by the people. Governments tell us that a carbon tax is an easy way to generate revenue. In my opinion, though, and in the opinion of those who are far more up to date on the tax, it is regressive. It is designed to change people's behaviour. According to the statistics, though, their behaviour has not changed. EUROSTAT's data from quarter 2 of 2022 show that Ireland had the highest greenhouse gas emissions, at roughly double the EU average per capita, and so on.

I will finish with what the working paper of the Economic and Social Research Institute, ESRI, stated in 2008 before the introduction of a carbon tax. It read: "A carbon tax in Ireland will not stop climate change – indeed, it is unlikely to have a measurable direct impact on global warming." A carbon tax is simply a symbolic signalling measure that has a most unfair effect on poorer people.

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