Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to take part in the debate on the Energy (Windfall Gains in the Energy Sector) (Cap on Market Revenues) Bill 2023.

It is important to place it in context, as is usual. The following has been referred to many times today, using different figures but all amounting to the same message. As of November 2022, it was estimated that roughly 40% of households in Ireland were experiencing energy poverty. That was up from 29% in June 2022, in a matter of months. Let that figure sink in; some 40% of households in Ireland were experiencing energy poverty in one of the richest countries in the world. That makes any sort of rational person of average intelligence begin to think about what is wrong with our policies. What is it we need to do rather than fighting? I hear lots of Ministers talking about how much money they provided but it is taxpayers money. What do we need to do with those startling figures? I have a friend who works with the Society of St. Vincent de Paul on a voluntary basis, as they all do, and the stories you hear are shocking. There is something seriously wrong with our policies and inequity. We hear it every year from Social Justice Ireland, which goes to enormous trouble to highlight the good and the bad of each budget, and it begs us and appeals to us to do something different.

Here we are bringing in a Bill which I welcome, and you could not but welcome a Bill which seeks to cap the revenue for energy companies at a certain point. The Bill was published on 31 August. It is 36 pages long, with four parts and 33 sections. In the scheme of the Bills we get before us, it is relatively compact. Trying to understand it, as I made the point yesterday, is extremely difficult. I find it ironic that we have the National Adult Literacy Agency, NALA, appealing for plain English language, and yet in the Dáil we persist with this. I consider myself to be of average intelligence and I take the trouble to read documents as best I can, although not always. It is difficult to do so in this case.

Let me welcome the theme of the Bill on a general level. The Bill seeks to cap revenue above a certain threshold. There are two different prices and one is a variable rate, depending on the sources. I will come back on how that will be distributed. The mechanisms of that are difficult to understand. Before I go into some more of it, I want to say that the delay in bringing in this Bill is simply unacceptable. The directive is from last October and it is almost a year later and we are bringing in a Bill. I understand that we cannot have retrospective legislation but this legislation is retrospective, is it not? It is going back to a certain period of time but not to when the peak profits were made. Perhaps the Minister of State will explain to us how we can be retrospective to a certain extent, but not go back to when the peak profits were made.

One thing is the delay in our obligation to implement the regulation.

Of course, only one aspect of it was to cap the revenue to give that revenue to those who are suffering. I will come to that if I can and if I have time. I am concerned about the vagueness of how that is to be paid out and the enormous power given to the Minister under section 28 and other sections to devise schemes outside of the Oireachtas and without our supervision.

The other stated aim of the EU regulation was to reduce electricity demand. I do not see that reflected anywhere in the legislation. I do not know where it will be reflected. Data centres have been mentioned many times and a sterile debate that we need data centres and putting our hands up for data centres rather than an analysis of what functions they are actually performing, the energy they are consuming and that what cost to our energy security is. None of that is reflected in today's debate.

Of course, the cap only applies to non-gas generators, producers, intermediaries and retail entities that are listed. As I said, I am extremely concerned that it confers great powers on the Minister. There is a lot of "may" and no "shall". It is not clear to me how it is to be distributed. The agency collecting it will be EirGrid and the CRU will manage the records and the accounts. I understand at the moment the CRU outsources over 23% of its work on reports. What provisions is the Government making to insource expertise in order that the CRU will be up to the job of managing this very complex - I would say contorted - mechanism for bringing back some of the obscene profits that have been made on the backs of suffering people?

When I read all this stuff, I feel the same as I did with whatever the subject was yesterday. We are willing partners with the EU in saying there is no way that can we distort the market; that is neoliberalism. We cannot distort the market but we can distort people's lives over and over. We can drive them to the brink. We can increase prices so that 88,000 people went without energy in this very rich country, but we cannot distort the market. However, when the market fails, as it repeatedly does with housing and with what happened with our energy, we will come up with contorted solutions to ensure their profitability and take back a little bit. Even then we will not put "shall" into the legislation; we put in "may" give back to those people who have suffered the most, as opposed to "shall". We do not explain why it is not retrospective but it is retrospective to suit the Government.

We do not look at the ten recommendations of the pre-legislative scrutiny which was completed last May. As usual, I thank the Oireachtas Library and Research Service for the digest it produced to help us. The committee's report on pre-legislative scrutiny published in May had ten recommendations. According to the digest produced by the Oireachtas Library and Research Service, three are clearly reflected in the Bill, five are possibly reflected - or it is unclear whether they are reflected - and two are not reflected at all. After we go to the trouble of pre-legislative scrutiny and the committee goes to the trouble of making ten recommendations, neither the Minister nor the Department even give us a response to that.

Of the two recommendations not reflected in the legislation, one, which all of us on this side of the House are asking for, is that the legislation should be more prescriptive in targeting the revenues raised at the most vulnerable. I, more than anyone, understand that legislation cannot be too prescriptive but the amount of power left to the Minister without any oversight is simply unacceptable.

The second one that has been omitted is that consideration be given to extending the cap on market revenues retrospectively to include the months when the energy crisis was at its peak. That is a recommendation from the committee's pre-legislative scrutiny report and it has been ignored. Ireland is one of eight countries to apply the minimum timeline, whereas all the other countries have extended that. Indeed, the EU's regulation allows us great discretion as to how we implement that with our legislation on the ground. We have taken the most minimalist approach. Seven EU members, including Austria and Belgium, have extended the application period in some way, either retrospectively or by making it longer.

Regarding the review carried out by the EU, the Commission or whatever competent authority did it for it, did its review even before we introduced our legislation. I do not know how we participated in that review and perhaps the Minister of State might enlighten us. Unfortunately, I will be gone, but I will check the record of his speech to see if he has enlightened me as to how we participated in that review before our legislation was passed or if we learned from it.

There is a failure to distinguish large providers and community-owned renewable energy generators. This was also raised at pre-legislative scrutiny. I am doing my best to find out how many community-led energy projects we have in this country. This is tangential but it is related. Fair play to Galway City Council, which declared a decarbonized zone back in 2019. We have still done nothing about that decarbonized zone in Westside, which is theoretically brilliant. We have a biodiversity emergency and a climate emergency, and yet in 2023 the council is still waiting on the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage for something or other. I have had so many answers to questions that I cannot remember. That is just an example of the failure to take it seriously.

I might come back to this at the end. We need transformative action. As the previous speaker said, we need to be independent in the provision of our energy and it must be done on a non-profit basis. We seem to be going headlong on the road of the very model that has caused the existential threat we are facing with climate change. Of course, the vulnerable always suffer most. I would love to see the Minister of State and the Green Party make a difference - they will have my full support - regarding community models and community-owned energy production. We can do that.

Yesterday we were discussing local government in Limerick. We discussed the decimation of local authorities and the removal of power from them. In that context I read many reports by the Association of Irish Local Government, which represents councillors, and various academics. They went around the world and pointed to remunicipalisation. There is a process of taking utility companies back into public ownership in countries that are the paragons of capitalism. In Germany, Canada and various other countries they are taking them back because they are more effectively run publicly, albeit with the expertise from outside and albeit with paying the workers decent wages and salaries.

I have said that the additional burden on the CRU needs to be faced and I would like clarification on that. As a Deputy, the lack of vision is really worrying to me. I do not want to be here week after week finding holes in the Government's policies but I have no choice, given what we are facing. The two words "transformative change" have been thrown out so frequently that they have become meaningless. All the time under that umbrella of transformative change, we are pursuing the very same policies that have led to disaster, as I have said already. I have serious concerns about the Maritime Area Regulatory Authority, MARA, set up to oversee the further development of the oceans. We are following the same exploitative model that has got us into trouble.

There are international examples of publicly owned utilities. EDF in France is a publicly owned utility that competes on the market as I understand it. Statkraft in Norway is the largest generator of renewable energy in Europe and is owned by the Norwegian state. The Norwegians did the same thing with oil and they put money aside in a sovereign fund while we did the complete opposite and almost bowed down to the profit-making companies without taking anything back.

I am trying to get my head around why gas determines the price of the other energy providers.

As the most expensive, it determines and allows the other companies to make obscene profits. I will finish by saying that Deputy Bruton spoke about how we are not giving recognition to the amount of money given out by the Government. I pay tribute to the Government for the money it has paid out, with billions in packages. My difficulty is that they are all once-off, notwithstanding that they are worth billions, without any transformative action. Deputy Bruton referred to the €1.6 billion given to help people to pay their bills. The reason that had to be so big was that the Government was tardy in bringing in legislation that would take even a little bit of profit back from the energy companies that are making obscene profits. The taxpayer had to come up with the €1.6 billion and the other billions that have been paid out. While I welcome that, I deplore the slow action of the Government in dealing with the threat. The war in Ukraine has certainly contributed to this but, for a very long time, Deputies on this side of the House were pointing out that energy prices were rising and rising to no avail.

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