Rose Conway-Walsh (Mayo, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Deputy O'Reilly is to come. She will probably be here, but if she is not I will continue on.

Sinn Féin and I, and my colleague, Deputy O'Rourke, have been warning this Government since October 2021 – two years ago – that our electricity pricing system was broken and that high gas prices were leading to skyrocketing prices for wind energy companies. At each stage, the responses from various Ministers were dismissive and often condescending. At the same time, the Government was blocking proposed reforms at EU level. The Government eventually found itself in a minority of states that still thought electricity generating company profits should be protected at the expense of households. When the Government realised that reforms were unavoidable, its approach became to do as little as possible as slowly as possible. That is why we are here in September 2023, two years later, and only now seeing legislation. It is quite shocking.

I welcome this legislation but it is important to put what it is, and how long it has taken to get here, in context. While the problems were obvious as far back as 2021, the real bumper profits flowed in 2022. Under this so-called windfall gains Bill, the bumper profits of electricity companies will include all those record profits made last year. This Government made the conscious choice to let energy companies keep all their windfall profits from 2021 and 2022, as well as most from this year. These profits were extracted at great pain to workers, families, businesses, schools and community centres. The Government is intentionally shutting the gate long after the horse has bolted. This can only be explained by a desire to protect bumper profits for electricity generating companies. The Government cannot claim it was not aware of this. It cannot claim even now that it does not have other options. The Government, like that of Spain, could have introduced, and can still do so, a real windfall tax on the profits of electricity companies alongside this market cap.

It is important to understand this is not just a story about corporate greed. The first thing to say is that we have a very complex electricity pricing system. Privatising the electricity system was complicated. It is like trying to privatise roads. The Government had to come up with a convoluted system that is completely counterintuitive. The simple point is that the system was broken when gas prices spiked and it required government intervention to fix. This Government stood idly by in the face of repeated warnings from Sinn Féin. In the budget in a couple of weeks’ time, we will hear the Government make the claim that it is economically and financially responsible when nothing could be further from the truth. It placed our economy in danger by allowing electricity companies to push households and businesses to the brink. At the same time, it missed out on €1 billion in potential revenue. This measure will only recoup a small fraction of the profits made.

This Bill will be celebrated by energy companies. It locks their profits in for 2022 and allows them to keep most of their windfall profits for this year. On 7 March, the Taoiseach stated that the Government would apply a windfall tax to electricity companies for their profits in 2022. This was repeated by the Minister, Deputy Harris, in May. This falsehood was an attempt to dress this legislation up as something it is not.

I welcome that the Government is finally taking a limited form of action but I believe the electorate will judge the Government harshly for how it has handled the cost of energy crisis and the price that ordinary people throughout this country have paid for the Government not acting sooner on this. It is quite shocking. We see the levels of energy poverty and energy deprivation. People have never worked harder in this country yet deprivation continues to rise. Energy deprivation is one of the drivers of that. It is disgraceful when we could have done what so many other countries did, as mentioned by my colleague, Deputy O'Rourke. This is not rocket science. It has been done in other countries. That is why we truly need a change of direction. We cannot keep tweaking around the edges of a thing that is so fundamentally wrong in terms of a government failing to protect its citizens from something as basic as the cold and providing energy for people at a reasonable price, when there was no need whatsoever for us to be in that situation in the first place.

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