Joan Collins (Dublin South Central, Independents 4 Change) | Oireachtas source

I welcome this motion from Sinn Féin. We are debating the matter ad nauseam, but the Dáil has to keep coming back to it. I recognise that the Government has spent €1.2 billion and assisted some people with their energy bills. However, it is trying to play down the cost-of-living crisis. For example, the Taoiseach stated this afternoon that inflation was decreasing and would decrease further in the middle of the year, yet people are seeing their grocery and energy bills increasing. This is the reality. I believe the Government hopes that people will accept and forget that, under it over the past year or so, real wages have decreased, living standards have decreased, and people's ability to pay their rents, mortgages and weekly bills has decreased. People will not forget. Ordinary people cannot forget that their bills are getting bigger while their ability to pay them is shrinking. People see the Government raising carbon taxes on consumers and dragging its feet every bit of the way on levying a windfall tax on the giant corporations whose profits are causing these massive utility bills.

I too do not support carbon taxes on ordinary people. There should be a wealth tax on people who can well afford to pay carbon tax. At the moment, poorer people are paying a carbon tax to provide grants to richer people who can afford to put in the wraparounds, while those paying the carbon taxes cannot.

Wholesale energy costs are going down while the Minister responsible for energy says he is frustrated at the energy costs but will not do anything to tax or regulate them to ensure that those reduced wholesale costs get passed on to ordinary people. There is to be €65 billion in estimated budget surpluses over the coming years but the Minister for Finance is proposing to ring-fence corporation tax receipts in the midst of a severe lack of housing, a severe decline in living standards and a severe crisis in public services. Last week, the OECD released a report showing a sharp decrease in living standards due to a fall in real wages. Oxfam released a report saying the same and yet executive pay and bosses' and CEOs' compensation has gone up 27%.

Wholesale energy prices and consumer energy prices are falling across Europe but electricity prices in Ireland remain the highest in Europe. The Society of St. Vincent de Paul produced a report, Warm, Safe, Connected?, which was brought before the Joint Committee on Social Protection, Community and Rural Development and the Islands today. It showed that the national rate of households that cannot afford to keep their homes adequately warm doubled from 3.2% to 7.4% between 2021 and 2022. That is 377,000 people. The rate among rural households increased fourfold. The highest rate related to one-parent families at 21.5%. The rate among people with disabilities was 19.5% and the rate for people who are unemployed was 17.4%. The society raised the issue of the disconnection moratorium having come to an end at the end of March. It was very concerned not only for people whose bills have increased and who are carrying great debt on those bills, but for people on pre-pay tariffs, particularly gas pre-pay tariffs, because those people could not avail of the €200 energy credit and are now in severe difficulty with their pre-pay accounts. These people cannot be cut off. The Government must tell the energy companies that they cannot cut people off unless they engage with them. In particular, it should look at how people on gas pre-pay tariffs can be supported.

The average increase in household electricity prices in the EU was 62% since 2020. In Ireland, it was 112%. In February, the household cost per kilowatt hour was 22.7 cent in Poland, 24 cent in Spain, 26.7 cent in France, 31.8 cent in Sweden and 49.9 cent in Ireland. Ireland had the highest household cost per kilowatt hour but the fourth lowest government support as a percentage of GDP. Prices are going down for other European countries because their governments introduced windfall taxes and price caps and controls. Instead, we get completely unaffordable prices that will not budge and a Minister who is frustrated but who will not do anything about it. There has been no windfall tax to recoup the massive profits these companies have drained out of ordinary workers' pay, no price controls, no caps and no reduced energy costs. I support the motion. A windfall tax should be introduced and legislation should give the CRU stronger powers to investigate price gouging.

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