Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú) | Oireachtas source

There are some wind superpowers in this Chamber at the best of times. We are finally discussing the windfall tax on 29 June 2023, as we approach the close of the first half of the year. After months and months of promises about the windfall tax, we are actually finally debating it. In the first instance we were told that it could not be done, then we were told that it was a competency of the EU, then we were told it would be delayed. Proposals and discussions have been mentioned practically every week in the media or this Chamber since last June.

It is an incredible situation while, at the same time, functional governments in other countries managed to introduce a windfall tax well before Christmas last year and those windfall taxes are reaping their harvest as we speak by reducing the costs of energy by putting pressure on those companies and also in creating revenue for the countries. The Italian Government introduced a windfall tax last year and collected €4 billion. Germany and Spain introduced their own windfall taxes in December. It seems that even the British Tory Government has a stronger social understanding of the world than the Fine Gael-Fianna Fáil-Green Party Government. The Government of the UK has made companies pay extra taxes on supernormal profits for at least the past six months.

Thankfully, we have managed to drag the Government kicking and screaming to this point. My worry is, however, that we could still be months away from this windfall tax being implemented. This is just part of a process. When will the tax actually come into play? Maybe the Minister of State will tell us when the Bill is likely to proceed through the whole Oireachtas, be signed by the President and be in place. That is an important question.

The primary reason for Bills such as that before the House is to put pressure on energy companies to stop making supernormal profits.

That is the reason for these taxes. In the first instance, we do not want companies to charge excessive prices for energy, or at least we should not want them to. A windfall tax ensures that if a company does proceed to charge supernormal profits, we will tax them, and that should act as a deterrent to companies doing that. The first objective is to prevent these companies from penalising citizens. As we have seen, companies have charged really high profits in this energy market over recent months. They have been profiteering. There has been greed and an instinct to make hay while the sun shines.

A lot of that has to do with the fact our energy market allows for that. In economic terms, this country has dysfunctional markets in energy, insurance, housing, banking and the food sector, which allow for a small number of players to make massive profits and exert enormous power over the rest of the markets. There does not seem to be either a Government instinct or a Government competency seeking to fix those markets in order that they would work properly and that there would not be this type of inordinate power in the hands of just a few organisations. I urge the Government to strive to resolve those imbalances and oligopolies that exist in so many markets in Ireland. In the first six months of last year, Bord Gáis Energy saw its revenues rise to €784 million from €484 million in the previous year, while its operating profits soared by 74%. The ESB Group made an operating profit of €847 million in 2022. This is a semi-State company making what amounts to a lottery win every day of the year. Is it not a great country that allows this to happen? The Government said it was fine. Sure, it is getting the dividends from the semi-State company in the end, but that is not the point. Those electricity prices were pushing families at the edge of existence to their limits. They were closing businesses.

In my county, Meath, for example, Tara Mines laid off people yesterday and contractors did so on the previous day, totalling 800 workers, in large part because electricity prices are so damn high. Tara Mines' second highest cost, after labour, is electricity. Electricity prices in this country are the highest in Europe, twice the European average per unit, which is incredible. The same mining company operates in Sweden with pretty much the same cost of inputs at every other level, but its electricity prices are so much lower there that it is able to operate. Two and a half weeks after those Tara Mines job losses, the Government has not come up with the goods to fix the price of electricity for the mine. It has not sought ways to reduce that, and that is absolutely wrong. Moreover, there is a problem on the part of the Green Party when it comes to Tara Mines. Tara Mines put out a request for the Minister, Deputy Eamon Ryan, to meet it a number of times to talk about these issues, but he did not. It also put out a request for the Minister to meet regarding the renewal of the licence to mine in Meath, but he did not. The whole licence process took months on this occasion and diverted the management's attention significantly away from the rest of the business for that period, yet the licence itself is far shorter.

It is important the Government get real about these types of jobs. Meath is different from every other county for a lot of reasons, but this reason in particular is not a good one. More Meath workers leave the county every day to go to work than stay in the county to do so. That happens in no other local authority area. The largest employer in one location in Meath is Tara Mines, which has now closed, and that is only there because of an accident of nature. I urge the Government to get real about lowering the cost of electricity for families, small businesses and the hundreds of jobs tied up in companies such as Tara Mines.

The truth is Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Green Party have resisted the reduction in the prices of fuel and electricity, and I honestly believe, as I have said previously to the Minister of State, that the Green Party ideologically seek high energy prices. The idea of carbon tax, for example, is to create high energy prices. High energy prices reduce demand, a key objective of the Green Party. It is no accident, therefore, that Ireland is in the worst place in terms of electricity prices and other energy costs. It is a policy outcome desired by the Green Party and other political parties. Fianna Fáil is an ideological husk and does not necessarily have a belief in anything, so it will go in any direction, but the Green Party tail is wagging the Fine Gael dog in this case in the context of energy prices. It is an important issue that the Government is looking to keep energy prices artificially high, not just through companies and what they charge but also through the level of taxes on energy the Government is taking in during an energy crisis and the worst cost-of-living crisis in living memory.

Parliamentary questions we in Aontú tabled show shocking figures for the levels of VAT, excise duty and other taxes the Government has taken in. It has taken in more VAT on fuel and energy during this cost-of-living crisis than ever before. Logically, during an energy crisis, a government would take in less tax to help people, but the Government is taking in more than ever before. That is stunning in the extent to which it is hurting people. The data show the total excise receipts in respect of fuel and energy for the past five years. For mineral oil tax, solid fuel, natural gas and electricity, the Government raked in €2.3 billion in 2022. Natural gas carbon tax reached a record high of €94.5 million, an increase of 13.4% since 2021 and of 89% since 2018. VAT on electricity reached record a record high of €381 million, with an increase of 40.4% since 2021. Gas taxes, too, reached a record high of €79 million, while those on home liquid petroleum gas, LPG, did likewise, at €14.8 million. There were also record highs in taxes on oil and petrol, diesel and solid fuel of €299 million, €382 million and €61 million, respectively, with VAT on auto LPG up as well. In total, VAT on all energy increased by an average of €27.48 million in a cost-of-living crisis.

There is a cruelty at the heart of the Government both allowing energy prices to remain so high among both companies and semi-State bodies and ensuring they will remain high by taking more tax on all of them than ever before. Is that not cruel? Is it not the opposite of the policy lever that should be pulled during a cost-of-living crisis? The Government is making and taking more than it has ever done before. This issue wrecks my head, to be honest, because I have raised it a number of times. Of course, the Government trots out the line about how it gave back money with the energy credits and here and there. If we add up all the energy credits the Government has given back, they amount to less than the increase in VAT and energy taxes on fuel in the past year. The Government took money out of one pocket, therefore, and it put some back in the other, but it is expecting a clap on the back for that. That is incredible. In any event, it should not be about taking money from people's pockets and giving it back. It should be about reducing the burden on people from costs.

Living standards in Ireland are falling, and that is an indictment of the Government. The amount of money workers can earn after adjusting for inflation fell last year. Fine Gael, at least, would like to pride itself on being the party of ambition for people expecting to earn more, but the Fine Gael-Fianna Fáil-Green Party Government has made people worse off in the past year. It is startling and it is having a significant impact on people's lives. The Government is not just part of the problem; in many ways, Government policy is the problem in the context of the cost of living, energy prices and taxes.

What is the outcome for families? Hundreds of thousands of families are living from overdraft to overdraft and many of them max out before their wages fall into their bank accounts at the end of the month. We have families in hock to moneylenders across the country, families going without food and other things and many families staying awake trying to work out what bill they can pay and what they can leave off till the next month. We are the sixth most expensive country in Europe and our communities are left behind. Twenty percent of the population is living below or at the poverty line, which is an incredibly high figure. Families' food bills on average are €1,000 higher than they were last year and grocery price inflation is still nearly 16%, which is an excruciating figure for families on a monthly basis. Rip-off Ireland is back with a vengeance and it is brought to you by Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Green Party. The most frustrating element of this has been the fact that the Government has stood idly by for so long and allowed this to happen. It has taken a phenomenal length of time for this simple Bill to get to the floor of the Dáil.

There are issues with this Bill and I will talk about them later but I will set out the context of the financial situation we are in. We see all this hardship and the Government and the energy companies profiteering and gouging but the background context is a Government that is revenue-rich. The Government is saying that we will have up to €65 billion in budget surpluses over the next number of years so this is not an austerity situation for the Government. It has the wherewithal to be able to help but it is making a conscious decision not to help in any way. We could have €65 billion over the number of years and we have 670,000 people living below the poverty line and 160,000 people in arrears on their gas bills. We have all this money and yet we have a massive capital investment problem. We have a housing crisis that is a national humanitarian crisis that has been allowed to continue for years. It needs capital investment to resolve the supply issue yet the Government will not focus money on that area. Nearly 1 million people are on hospital waiting lists. We heard today about young children waiting in pain and agony at significant detriment to them for a simple scoliosis operation and yet the Government will not put in the necessary investment. Hundreds of thousands of people are in commuter hell. People are commuting from Munster, Connacht and Ulster to Dublin on a daily basis for well over three hours a day. What is the Government's response? It is going to increase the tolls tomorrow and increase them again by the end of the year. Then the Government, which increased excise duty three weeks ago, will increase it in September and October. The Minister is really putting the squeeze on citizens who are trying to work. The increase in tolls is a tax on work. It is highway robbery by the Government but, again, it is part of the ideology that wants to use the stick to put people off the roads without putting the alternative of public transport in place for those individuals.

I understand that IFAC and the ESRI have rightly identified potential dangers relating to overheating and constraints around significant investment into the country but we must remember that for the past ten years, Ireland had the lowest capital investment ratio in Europe. I made a mistake - Romania had the lowest while we were second lowest. Capital investment ratios have increased recently, which is good, but most of that capital investment is just dealing with the capital depreciation that occurred over those ten years. We are miles away from actually meeting the needs of a growing society we have. We forget this. The Government trots out the line that it is spending more money on this and that but the population is significantly higher so it needs significantly higher investment. I accept that current spending does create problems, particularly corporation tax because it is unstable in Ireland. The reason why corporation tax is unstable in Ireland is because we are significantly dependent on the FDI sector in terms of those receipts. If we had a more balanced economy with more indigenous businesses which were stickier in terms of location, that corporation tax could be used for the general purposes of the country because it would be far more stable but because of the over-reliance on FDI, we have this instability in corporation tax and, therefore, a fear among economists of using that corporation tax for investment in Ireland.

One-off capital investment is not dependent on stability. It can be invested in and will not create an ongoing need that would create an investment hole if corporation tax disappeared. I appeal to the Government. We now have choices in terms of what to do with this rainy day fund, the windfall tax, corporation tax etc. What we need to do is make sure we invest in the necessary infrastructure to make sure we have housing, health and proper transportation systems. The Government will say that it is not prudent to have these types of investments at times of constraint yet it is talking about major tax cuts for high-income earners in the next budget. On one level the Government talks about prudence and at the next level, it talks about injecting significant money into the economy, which would increase inflation.

I welcome the fact that we are discussing this Bill. It is late - damagingly and hurtfully late - but we need to make sure the Government uses every lever, not just this, to put pressure on the energy companies to reduce the excess profiteering that is happening to make sure we give families a break and to let businesses do their job and keep their employees working.

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