Ruairi Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

It was the equivalent of calling Michael J. Fox "chicken" all right. I realise that.

The points have been very well laid out by my colleagues. What we are talking about is "too little too late". We have constantly been told about what could and could not be done, but it took until when the European Commission and the European Union were willing to look at windfall taxes. There are examples right across Europe of those that have introduced windfall taxes that kick in at a much lower level of profit, which means a bigger dividend for the State. We know all the other alternatives that could have been looked at where windfall tax could have been kept at a certain level of honesty, if we had looked at price capping and all those other issues. At times, the conversation in the Chamber is one-liners and it is not absolutely clear.

Anybody who is operating a constituency office, or is hitting doors or whatever, has probably seen plenty of people's bills for costs they cannot afford. Those people's biggest issue, particularly anybody who travelled abroad, and a number of business people who had been in Spain, Portugal or many other countries approached me, is that they were aware of bills in those countries coming down and we were the last on the line. It must be the case that the energy companies here were not exactly at the races as regards introducing hedging.

That is where we are. Deputy O’Rourke also spoke, as we all do, about wind power and the opportunities we have to almost be a superpower in that. We all want to see that. We all want to see a move away from fossil fuels. We want to see Ireland being a major driver in changing the entire European energy setup. The big fear regarding RESS 3 is that we will not have enough players looking to get in, because of all the other issues that have not been dealt with by the Government. At the end of the day, the buck stops with it. There are planning issues and all those other ancillary issues. We have all seen the benefits, particularly across parts of Scandinavia, where states invested in their own energy future. They were able to get a dividend back for the people in the state. We want to see a huge number of companies coming in here. We want to see both onshore and offshore wind. We need to make sure that there is a community dividend but beyond that, I would like to see a State dividend.

At this point, we are looking at measures that are too little, come too late, are not for long enough and are not for big enough money. The fact is that people out there, beyond this Leinster House campus, are showing everyone in here bills they cannot pay. We all have heard of people who have put in applications. We had hoped this would have put serious pressure on energy companies, rather than the pressure being on the people who cannot afford their bills. At times, we need to look for social welfare payments and other measures to bridge that gap but that is just not a workable system. Once again, Deputy Conway-Walsh put it very well when she said the energy companies will be very happy with this but the people will not be. It is not enough and it needs to be revisited.

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