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

We all understand this to be a technical Bill involving a transfer of all functions for the State's gas infrastructure from the current company, Ervia, to the new publicly owned company, Gas Networks Ireland. Deputy O'Rourke has laid out some of the issues that arise when we talk about the gas market or energy markets across the board. When people talk about that in this day and age, most of them are just talking about the fact of the cost that comes to them. We have stated explicitly - I think there is a considerable amount of conversation in the public domain at this stage - and people realise that even if the prices from our energy providers are dropping, they are dropping more slowly than everywhere else across Europe. It does not fill us with any great hope when the CRU says there is nothing to see here.

I think there is major agreement that we need to ensure that the CRU, the regulator, has the powers and then has an interest in delivering this. It is no big shock that some of the price drops we saw happened at a point in time when there was considerable conversation in the public domain and even among politicians as to how high prices were. We have all heard the difficulties as regards hedging etc., but we must work on the basis that the providers here were among the worst as regards their particular means of hedging. We need to look at all these parts.

We accept that there is no magic bullet to deliver us the prices that existed a number of years ago, before the Ukrainian crisis. When people go abroad, however, and see the prices people are paying in Spain, Portugal or anywhere else, and see that some countries were faster to deal with the issues of windfall taxes and so on, it raises questions.

I think everybody would agree that there is an onus on the Government to actually do something about this. Obviously, there are the issues we face as regards supply and security of supply. We are still awaiting the security of supply report, the McCarthy report. Deputy O'Rourke is a broken record in talking about that, but the problem with that is that the Government is a broken record in not actually publishing what is needed in order that we can at least have a proper conversation about this. Anyone who has done basic geography at any point in time understands that when there is talk of foreign direct investment or any sort of inward investment to particular locations, one of the vital pieces is secure and safe energy supply. It is hard to believe that we have had question marks in the last while in that regard and that people, alongside paying huge prices, with many of them not fit to pay them, could be facing into blackouts. This is just not acceptable in any way and needs to be dealt with.

I do not know how many times we have been here or how many Members have been here talking about the big advantages we have as regards renewables, particularly when it comes to offshore or even onshore wind.

The RES-3 auction just shows the problems and the pieces that have not been put in place by this Government. We all know there are huge issues and question marks as we move from a developer-led to a planning-led system regarding offshore wind. We still do not know whether we are going to have all those parts of the planning infrastructure, including the Maritime Area Regulatory Authority, MARA, and everything, as resourced as they can be, and that the work on designed maritime area plans, DMAPs, can be provided at least to those people who are interested in investing as soon as possible. This is from the point of view that they understand what the gameplay is going to be. Then we need to make sure we have the pieces regarding community dividend. Many in here have stated how we never got any bang for our buck as a State from our own natural resources. We would like to think that there would be some sort of investment, involvement and payback to the State. First of all, we would need to get those planning pieces in play as soon as possible.

I have two other issues I want to bring up. I have been contacted by people about the registered gas installer, RGI register, and gas engineers from the North having difficulties in getting on this. In fairness, some of the people who have contacted me about the difficulty this is creating in getting them on site for building necessary houses in my constituency and beyond. This is something that will need to be addressed. I will get the details to the Minister of State as quickly as possible, and maybe someone from the Department could make contact with some of the individuals I am talking about.

I am going to revisit the issue of Carlinn Hall in Dundalk, and the communal heating system. On the feasibility study regarding a shallow geothermal heat source, from an answer to a parliamentary question I got over the summer, there are recommendations for the short, medium and long term. The report has been drafted. I think it still has to be published. I would like to be contradicted on that and to be told that it is suddenly up but I do not think that is the case. We need to see it as soon as possible. The answer to my parliamentary question also told me there is a belief that there would be grant schemes already in place that could be used for this. We know those people had to deal with absolutely disastrous and ridiculously high prices of gas. We know that district heating is one of the means by which we can look at decarbonisation. However, communal heating systems are almost the Achilles heel, so there is an absolute requirement on Government to deliver.

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